Without Sanctuary
A meditation on race and injustice.
By Donovan X. Ramsey
I wrote the following in the hours that followed a grand jury’s decision to not indict Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. More than a year later, another grand jury has decided to not indict two Cleveland officers for killing 12-year-old Tamir Rice in cold blood. Here we are again…
I spent the days leading up to the grand jury announcement to not indict Darren Wilson trying to write about anything but my feelings. “How do I feel?” was a new and dangerous question.
You see, a part of functioning successfully — that is to say, surviving — as a young, black man in America is not feeling. To feel would mean to be constantly enraged, anxious, naively hopeful, or worse, to feel out of control. And if America demands anything of black people it’s that we be in or under control. The only alternatives are prison and death. Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley, Mike Brown, Ezell Ford, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo — all threats, all recent reminders of that.
It’s constant work to cultivate and maintain the layers of insulation needed to exist in such a state a terror. Attaining the American Dream becomes not just about personal fulfillment, or even the accumulation of wealth, but survival. Every rung on the socioeconomic ladder promises distance from harm — even if it can’t guarantee it. So, you climb with the sound of chomping below you and pray that each step you take is steady and sure. You work, you don’t feel.
And one discovers that there are a few hiding places, spaces and identities not yet marked or traced with chalk outlines. Beauty, old age, accomplishment, esteem, celebrity. They feel like safety but all fall short of the real thing. So, in the absence of sanctuary, we control what we can; what we wear and on what streets we live and walk. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in…” takes on new meaning.
I must’ve been about 12 years old the first time a police officer ever pointed a gun at me. It was summer and I was visiting my cousin when my aunt called the police on her neighbors, a group unsupervised teenage boys who smoked weed in their backyard, started fights and harassed girls. That day, she looked out of her kitchen window and saw one of them beating his dog and had enough.
My cousin and I went to the front porch to watch, looking down the steep front yard, for the police to arrive. A few minutes after my aunt called 911, a cruiser came zooming up the street but it didn’t take the turn we expected past the front of my aunt’s house then into the alley around back. It stopped abruptly in front of where we were and the cops got out. They approached the house, where I was sitting on the front porch with my cousin, with their guns drawn.
The memory hasn’t lost clarity over the years. I can recall clearly the Columbus Police Department cruiser stopped at an angle in the street. The white car was decorated with red and blue stripes, a badge on the door and on each side was a grown man crouched, holding a pistol.
I don’t remember what we said or did but it must’ve been the right thing — whatever that is. Maybe our hands went up and we told them it wasn’t us, that we weren’t the bad guys. Whatever happened, they put their guns back where they belonged and made their way up to the front door.
We could have been killed, so many are. Some make the news, most don’t and you wonder how many others you’ll never know. Their killers are hardly ever held accountable. In the case of Darren Wilson, they’re not even made to give account.
I woke up the day after it was confirmed Wilson would not stand trial for killing Mike Brown unable to climb, unable to hide. There were too many dead bodies everywhere I looked. Tamir Rice in my hometown, Akai Gurley where I now live and Darren Wilsons on the loose.
I watched the announcement that there would be no justice for Mike Brown unable to get comfortable. I writhed in my bed unsure of what I might say or do if I got up, suppressing the familiar urge to scream. I should have screamed. In fact, I should have been screaming all along. We all should have been.
I feel all at once lost, foolish, deep sadness and, most intensely, unmistakable rage. It’s not the hot, bubbling hatred of the spurned or the confused. It’s too cool and too clear for that, and it doesn’t consume.
Perhaps it was there all along.
Donovan X. Ramsey is a multimedia journalist whose work puts an emphasis on race and class. Donovan has written for outlets including MSNBC, Ebony, and TheGrio, among others. He’s currently a Demos Emerging Voices fellow.
