Dead Faces That Look Like Mine
The present absence of moral consequence for killing Black faces + the humans behind them.
A troll was trying to troll me. Which reminded me of why I still use my actual phone number on every OXBOW release. Like it’s damned near impossible to crank call King Crank, it’s even harder to troll someone whose core beliefs are quicksilver and healthily involved in even the most minute of recalibrations. For intellectual reasons.
But he kept mentioning names. Names as punchlines. I had just gotten back to America after traveling outside of America for almost a month and I had missed a few steps. So, names as punchlines, but because I wasn’t getting it and/or rising to the bait he added some context.
Fundamentally this: those niggers got what they deserved.
Which is right when it clicked: these were the names of victims in extrajudicial killings of, usually, Black men that had made the news in the scant month I had been away. Names at this point that have now become part of a canon of terrible inevitability. A traffic stop, or some other minor infraction. This, and then a rapid descent into what ends up being a dead American, usually Black, at the hands of a state that shrugs through trying to explain how this could happen. Again.
And again. And again. And again.
The troll was dispensed when I pushed way beyond the boundaries of the normal and healthy and suggested that America might be better served with a surfeit of honesty and just embrace the wholesale killing of Black men. Every one. And he was welcome to start with me. The thinking, as explained to him, was: if you could, you should. Because you can, and you don’t, which leads me to believe that the objectives are not structured but just…haphazard.
Is it a meditation on the limits of masculinity? A cultural absorption of illness buoyed by self-hatred? Or an unstated state objective that benefits from the haphazard which, no matter how scattershot, still manages to serve the same end?
And then something else that struck me: fuck ups rule the Earth.
If our society is based on laws and laws are the products of what we decide to do right when we’ve done something wrong, this seems fairly close to the truth.
But then I think about 29-year-old, and never any older now, Tyre Nichols. Five peace officers have been charged in his death, though this time there’s a wrinkle. Though Internet claims a white officer was present who wasn’t charged, the five officers present who were charged were Black. Also.
“Let’s see if the country is gunna be mostly peaceful w/some fires again. 30 more minutes and the video from Atlanta is released,” wrote a Police Captain friend of mine.
My response: “Black cops, Black victim? What do you think?”
And then his unsurprising goad yielded this, surprisingly: “I think it’s very sad to watch. The pole cam is the one that gives the most perspective. A couple of kicks to the face, haymakers and uppercuts. It’s cowardly and pretty terrible. I don’t know that it’s as bad on the eyes as Rodney King, but it’s bad enough.”
While I was wondering if this would have been his take had the cops been white, I took note of something else: he actually watched the video. I have not, nor will I. I used to watch them all, reasoning that if the victims endured it, I would be honoring their memory by also enduring it. And then maybe working for change or…well, something.
But I can tell you exactly when I stopped watching the videos: August 1st, 2020. The birth of my fourth daughter having cemented for me that whatever kind of lurid misery porn this has become is not to be accepted/embraced/absorbed as such when you process that these were all somebody’s baby.
Driven home, most terribly by some of these men calling for their mothers in their last moments.
Is it a meditation on the limits of masculinity? A cultural absorption of illness buoyed by self-hatred? Or an unstated state objective that benefits from the haphazard which, no matter how scattershot, still manages to serve the same end?
I asked why they were hurting those people and my mother said “they don’t like Black people and here, are trying to keep them from voting. Now: time for bed.”
And once again Black fathers, and Tyre Nichols was one as well, post up to have “the talk” with their sons, and also their daughters. A talk that’s designed to school the youth on surviving America, specifically cops in America, but which is about as useful as a talk on how to survive getting struck by lightning.
Additionally, instilling fear and then advising that your responses from here on out not be fear-based seems well-intentioned, but misguided. What seemed to work better is how it worked in my household.
“Gene. Come here. I want you to see something.”
I have memories of my parents waking me up to see The Jackson 5 the first time they appeared on TV. But this was not that.
This was white cops with German Shepherds tearing into Black folks without German Shepherds. There were firehoses. Cops with batons clubbing old women that reminded me of my great grandmother. This went on for what felt like…hours. And when it was over I asked why they were hurting those people and my mother said “they don’t like Black people and here, are trying to keep them from voting. Now: time for bed.”
There was one other time they woke me up that I remember. It was when they started airing footage of seal hunters clubbing baby seals to death. It was horrible and we all cried. But how do you explain reality? And more importantly what’s the point of explaining to your eyes what your eyes have just seen?
At this point, given the ubiquity of cellphones, I have seen cops beat white, homeless men to death, Black women, Black teenage girls, shoot 9-year-olds, and maintain their apex interest in gang abusing the likes of Rodney King and others.
But cops are just the hands, and all the cops in my family have readily admitted this. That is: they’re not the only problem. They are one of the symptoms of the problem. The problem is, as it stands, that being a superpower comes with some small print downsides and those have everything to do with the unexplained and unquenchable thirst for the application of the jungle politic that guides our lives.
We kill and beat to show that killing and beating is wrong, we mythologize killing and beating, we sport-ify it, commoditize it, purchase it, declare it an inalienable right, drink and get drunk on it 24 hours a day of every day of every week of every month of every year.
So, you want to ask me now, why and how it is so?
Simply because we willed it to be.
Now: time for bed. And if you should die before you wake, well, what the hell did you expect?
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Did you “enjoy” what you just read? If so, be the first on your block to pre-order A Walk Across Dirty Water + Into Murderer’s Row: A Memoir by the author of what you just read. If not? Well, that sounds like a “you” problem.
I tried 6 times to respond to this piece... I can't. There is nothing I can say - I think you said it all. </3