We Survived 2015

2015 had a strange and unyielding obsession with my heart, finding ways to repeatedly rip it out my chest and dare me to live with it outside of my body. Repeatedly forcing me to put my heart through Hell as I watched the injustices mount, finally culminating with the grossly misconducted investigation of Tamir Rice’s execution by the Cleveland Police Department. That put my heart on its deathbed, and I’m not sure it will fully recover from the whirlwind of tragic and infuriating horrors that was 2015.

There was a kind of a sick and twisted ebb and flow to the macabre mood of 2015, a kind of game of sorts that not only tested the strength of my heart, but of my will to live on some days. This questioning extended to my online interactions, some of which I have chronicled in pieces scattered across the Internet, notably in my piece exhorting Black Men to expand their scope of what it means to be Pro-Black. Much of that questioning revolved around how we treat those women we claim to love when we ignore or propagate the ideals of Patriarchy when we insinuate that Sandra Bland would have been alive had she had a husband. Reality shows us that the police are not afraid of killing Black men under the pretext of “fearing for their lives” and if nothing else, 2015 showed us quite clearly in several high profile cases involving Black women like Natasha McKenna and Rekia Boyd that this hatred of Black skin did not stop at Eric Garner and Michael Brown. 2015 was the year that solidified my distrust and apathy towards the American justice system, a year that saw us seek to exonerate the crimes of Bill Cosby in the face of a deposition that exposes his active participation in the procuring and administration of date rape drugs to women. A year that saw failure after failure after failure of the Justice System to bring anyone to justice who wore a badge. It finally decided to throw us a bone in December, I suppose so that those of us who actually trust the system can have an exception to cling to. I have no such trust in an American Justice system that is both a joke and a reminder of the system of White Supremacy upon which America was founded. “What justice?” has seemingly been the refrain of Black people in America since the words “all men are created equal” were written in a document which legalized the slavery of those with African blood. 2015 was the year that solidified the inescapability of the connection between the Police and the slave trade and the criminal justice system that invariably creates an updated version of the slave trade in the halls of jails and prisons across America. As much as 2015 was the year of social change and reform, it was also the year of the reminder that the duty of the state towards its Black citizens has not strayed very far from its duty during the turbulent era of the 1960’s. There were still state sponsored lynchings, still guilty murderers of Black, Native and Latin American bodies who were set free by courts weighted to allow injustice to reign.

Then there was the matter of Bill Cosby, (this bears a bit of discussion, not just an offhanded mention) and the matter of disregarding the testimony of over 50 women to believe our imaginations over their accounts. The matter of Black men and women caping for a man who would probably sooner tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps than to actually do anything to help them escape the pull of poverty. The man who gave a now infamous “Pound Cake” speech which amounted to a sermon on the mount of the responsibility of Black people to earn their humanity by affixing themselves to the White ideal of personhood. To earn our humanity by being “good enough” for the White majority to stomach and to be kind to. Our names were belittled, single mothers were blamed for the ills of the community, a mountain of half and untruths passed off as the answers to an American system which often excluded most of us from its Dream. And the whole time he was peddling this diatribe on respectability, he was the farthest thing from respectable himself. There were the lies peddled about him buying NBC, the arguments about Stephen Collins and Charlie Sheen benefiting from White Privilege as if his raping 50 women over the last 40 years was some suddenly thrown together scheme from White America to bring about his downfall. 2015 was quite a year.

2015 was unmistakably the year of the defense of Blackness from the all out assault on it from all angles. Building on the growth of 2014, the movement for Black lives expanded, and so did our fatigue with the continual injustice that is policing in America. 2015 was the year of the viral police execution, without question. It often seemed like a new video every week or every other day, and with what culminated as the deadliest year on record as it regards police killings of civilians, with a little over 1,000 deaths which comes out to average around 3 people a day there is little doubt that it is not in the minds of Black people. There is evidence, there are numbers which back up our claims that the police see us as inherent threats to their lives and security. I wish we could leave this in 2015. I wish we could forget about the injustices and the pain and the hurt and the absolute abandonment of justice for Black people in America in 2015, but we cannot. We will carry these and more into this new year, in our collective memories, because to forget these moments of Hell is to give them the okay to happen again. To forget Dylan Roof’s infiltration of Black America’s oldest church with a history of revolution against the regime of White Supremacy is to forget that in short, that is the history of America with Black bodies and Black resistance. 2015 was a difficult year to live in, but we survived it. Those who did not survive it, those who were sacrificed to the altar of “progress” like the parishioners of the church that Denmark Vesey founded will forever burn upon our hearts and will fuel our drive to dismantle the very system which both demanded their lives and profited from their deaths. 2015 was a rough year on my heart, it was a rough year on Blackness, it tore at me, it tested me, it demanded my resolve, it demanded my attention, but it’s finally over.

Somehow I survived that Hell. Somehow we survived that Hell. But survival was for 2015. Now I’m looking forward to the dismantling of 2016. The change that must come to ensure that we are not trapped in the aspirations of Presidential candidates or placated by pandering or soundbytes. In 2016,there must be a thirst for more than survival. There must be a destruction of the America we know, so that the America that works can emerge. If that’s too much to ask for, maybe we can at least shake America out of this dream of equality and justice, because I’ve watched too many of us die in 2015 to believe that America will change of its own accord.

We survived 2015. But we will not forget the cost of that survival.