The black community aches as senseless tragedies continue
There are moments, sometimes days, when you can forget.
You’re watching your children run around the neighborhood playground carefree and smiling, or you’re laughing with friends over dinner, or you’re sharing a quiet moment with your significant other.
But those times don’t last long. Because soon enough you’ll open social media and see another video of a man or woman or even worse, a child, that looks like your husband or your best girlfriend or your own middle schooler and it’s another gut punch, another affirmation that our bodies — we — can be held in little to no regard.
The last 10 days or so have offered reminder after reminder of this, and the stress and heartbreak and sense of despair are overwhelming.
Last week, the video of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery was made public. Please believe that were it not for an attorney leaking the video to a media outlet the men who pursued and killed Arbery, an unarmed black man jogging through a neighborhood where they didn’t believe he belonged, would still be free. Gregory and Travis McMichael were arrested because the public saw the video of what happened to Arbery on February 23, and the pressure to do the bare minimum became too great to ignore.
Then came news that Breonna Taylor, a black woman asleep in her apartment, was killed by members of the Louisville Metro Police Department in March. Police were executing a warrant at the wrong address for a suspect they already had in custody, entering Taylor’s apartment just after 1 a.m., reportedly without announcing themselves. Again, it took weeks for news of her death to become known, and only now is pressure being applied to city officials to provide answers on why things went so terribly wrong. So far none have come.
Those are major things.
But there are smaller events that crop up, usually put in front of us through social media, that underscore reality. On Thursday, it was video of a black delivery truck driver in Oklahoma, detained for over an hour by the white leader of a homeowners association as he was trying to leave the gated community. The HOA head, David Stewart, used his own car to block the road and repeatedly asked the driver, Travis Miller, to identify himself and demanded to know to which home he had made a delivery.
Miller recorded the interaction, and was in tears by the end of the video, which he posted on Facebook Live.
His frustration is so familiar to many of us.
Miller told NBC News that he didn’t want to escalate the situation with Stewart, but began recording in case his employer had questions.
And let’s be honest: he also did it to protect himself. He had no way of knowing what Stewart might do if he didn’t acquiesce to his demands, and if it turned terrible for Miller, there was evidence he wasn’t in the wrong.
In Miller’s case, in Arbery’s case, in Taylor’s case, there is no evidence that the black victims were the aggressors.
Their only offense, particularly in the cases of Arbery and Miller, is that they were black bodies in places white people did not believe they were supposed to be.
I’m sure if I looked a little bit I’d see a few more such incidents over the last 10 days or so. Because they seem to happen that frequently.
I can’t watch the Arbery video. I haven’t seen it, and I won’t — I watched the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park five years ago and it is burned on my memory, a beautiful boy whose life was ended as he played alone. For my own wellbeing, I can’t subject myself to watching more unnecessary deaths.
That such videos exist is a positive in that they have finally opened the eyes of some to the vicious racism African Americans continue to face. But far too many watch them, are aghast, and then move on, because they can.
No one is hunting 25-year-old white men in the street while they jog.
Rare is the white delivery driver prevented from doing his job in any neighborhood, gated or not.
When I see pictures of Arbery with his warm smile, I think of our own son, just as I thought of him when Trayvon Martin was killed. Or Jordan Davis. Our son has a great smile and since coming to live with us when he was 12, has been more than willing to watch “Hannah Montana” or “Paw Patrol” or play along with whatever crazy game his little sisters are creating and is generally a joy to be around. I wonder if there will ever be a day that someone thinks he’s not where he’s “supposed” to be and the worst will happen, because all they know of him is that he’s a black man and they need that black man to be put in his place.
When I heard Miller’s story, I recalled the time when my husband arrived at a private home in a wealthy neighborhood for a party. The party was for faculty and staff at the independent school where he worked at the time; my husband pulled up the driveway to park and was immediately told, “the help parks in the back.” To that person, there was no chance my husband was a guest.
These are our lived experiences. We almost never have a cell phone camera rolling to record them. But they happen, small reminders to violent encounters, the reinforcement that for so many we are and will always be “other”, that we’re not enough, not worthy enough.
All of it built on a lie that black skin makes a human inferior.
It’s a weight that’s always there. It can mentally exhaust you.
There are moments when life is ... life. Work success or relationship frustration or children bickering over a toy. I imagine these kind of mundane things happen in any home or family.
But then there’s a stretch like the last 10 days and the heartbreak washes over you anew, and you’re reminded that for as much as you so desperately wish it would, not much has changed.
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