Aftermath: The Collective Trauma of Modern American Lynchings

Originally written on Thursday, July 7 2016

The sickled tongue of the camera phone gave truth to the world, while one image, the pop of five bullets woke the agitated child. We exhaled, and the ancestors poured from our throats, like the Black blood on the pavement. The sickled tongue of another’s camera moved again like a molten whip to raise up the wraiths once more. And then the whole Black world was still for the first time since Trayvon. The ancestors rushed through the canals of our throats and left us gagged, silent, with the rope tied tight, wrenching, about our necks.

When we saw the second video of Alton Sterling being murdered by two police in Baton Rouge, none of us could be prepared for the violence captured. We are not disillusioned or surprised that Sterling was killed by police, because we know the history of police, policing, the connections to slavery, prisons, the Fugitive Slave laws, but we saw his blood, deep, vermillion, and we heard his last breaths, echoing Garner in Staten Island. We’d saw what they do, what we know they do, up close, in high-def. We were horrified. We are horrified.

Sunsetting, she spoke to the world in real-time, seated but feet from the bright red of her lover’s blood, her daughter’s presence behind her, a weapon of ivory hands more dangerous than the metal used to exact ill-placed retribution, howling like the madmen in gowns of white, helter-skelter, fixed just out the window. We commit another ancestor to speak from beyond, again, slipping out of bullet holes, past the window, Philando.

It felt unreal. We were paralyzed by the immediate murder of Philando Castile, before we could catch our breath from the shock of what will perhaps be remembered as the most traumatizing video of a police murder of all time. This left many people restless, defeated, unable to sleep, unable to begin to heal because the blow pushed any strength remaining from our bodies and minds with a force easily attributable to something non-human.

We are being hit so heavily by those who would rather us dead than alive, silent than loud, bleeding than healing. Many are simply incapacitated. Our leaders have stumbled. For the first time, people were unsure what to do, and it left us with the sense that our nemesis persists, our defenses up, but perhaps in vain, at least it seems.

People are tired of marching for reformation of policy and practice (enforcement) predicated on our deaths– so what do we do?

I think the answer can be found by casting our eyes on the movements for liberation in Apartheid South Africa for instance, and remembering as Angela Davis says it, that “freedom is a constant struggle.”

We see that the dismantling of systemic oppression requires long distance running, sometimes so long, that generations perish before any meaningful change has happened. What do/are we as organizers, as Black people, as queer people to say when folks are simply tired and feel defeated?

I don’t think I know the answer. But I do know it is up to us to figure it out, because believe me, no one is coming to save us from an increasingly militarized police state, an aggressively apathetic majority, poverty stricken streets.

I say, we Organize. We hold individual police who commit murder accountable, while remembering and centering as much as we do their arrest, the implication of the entire system of policing. We have failed as organizers if people ONLY consider Zimmerman, Liang, Pantelo, Trump, Coulter, who are, individual manifestations of internalized hatred, supremacy complex, as the issue. They are harbingers of Black death– so we must curtail them, but more so, the ideological, governmental, psycho-social, and for some, the pseudo-religious oppression of all people, in particular those of color.

Simply, every person involved in the movement for Black lives must speak to the dismantling of the systems, being careful not to be ambiguous and perpetuate a mythological “system” that we use colloquially, but spell it out for folks– we are talking about White Supremacy, Patriarchy, Elitism, global-capitalism — we have to talk in intersections– we have to talk about the murder of a Black transwoman and that of Alton, as part and parcel of the same systems of oppression before we can even have a conversation of dismantling anything, let alone liberation.

We are not allowed to give up if we want to live.

We have to continue equipping every person that will listen with the tools needed to win.

We need our own independent media. We have to write our own articles. We need to protect the internet, so that it remains free and open. We can’t depend on CNN to talk about dismantling white supremacy, state violence, etc, if it is in direct opposition to the key players’ self-interest.

Organize. Politicize. Join an organization. Your tweets and re-sharing of posts are important, but there is power when we work collectively. If you can, join the organizations on the ground, like your local ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬ chapter or BYP 100.

If we want them to stop killing us, we are going to have to do these things and more.