Trayvon Martin
Surely the most serious accusation leveled against Beyoncé and her visual album, Lemonade, is that she exploited the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others when she placed them in her video, trading on their tears to generate controversy and sales. Similar accusations were made when she included footage from Katrina-wrecked New Orleans in the video for “Formation.” Katrina was over 10 years ago; Martin was killed in 2012. In the years since, Bey has mostly been presented as having fairly mild political or race-related opinions. Surely there is some political and financial calculus behind her decision to become outspoken now.
If these accusations were true, Beyoncé would be despicable. But if she is, then I am, too.
We are nearly halfway through 2016, and yet I remember clearly how I found out that Trayvon Martin had died. I was sitting in my office, chatting to my sister who had called unexpectedly. She told me the story about a boy in Florida named Trayvon who had very recently been killed walking home one night. How he was 17 years old. How he had a bottle of sweet tea and a bag of Skittles on him as he died. My sister was horrified by the tragedy, but she still didn’t expect my reaction. I cried — hard. At my desk, without deeply understanding why, for the duration of our call and after. I don’t know if I’ve cried over a stranger like that before or since. But something got inside me that day, and I’ve never dislodged it. It sticks with me, roaming under my skin, nearly every single day. Yes, I think about Trayvon Martin nearly every single day.
Why? Was it the tape of his death that I made the mistake of listening to? Was it thinking about his mother and being unable to imagine — yet shuddering whenever I attempted to — what was taken from her that night? Was it his bag of Skittles? Was it that my best friend in grad school was a tall, black man who got flirtatious “hellos” and big smiles during the day, but was roundly avoided when walking around Boston at night with a hoodie on? Was it being 27 and for the first time actually imagining having a son of my own who might be gunned down one day and then publicly damned for defending himself?
All of those things?
There is another event that will never leave me, though I rarely, if ever, talk about it. And that’s how it felt to watch the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. To sit 1000 miles from home and learn that my mother’s workplace had been flooded, and that she and hundreds of others would lose their jobs. My family would never the same after this. To watch the lines of people queue up at the Superdome, and hearing reports that power, food, and toilet facilities were insufficient….to watch the waters tear through homes, watch the destruction and the anguish. It felt like death.
This post isn’t really about Beyoncé, who certainly doesn’t need my help, and whose contributions to both Black Lives Matter and post-Katrina relief are increasingly being made known. It’s about my visceral reaction to anyone asking a black woman, “but where have you been?” when it comes to her decision to speak out on things that have been too hard to bear and to name. Because I, too, could easily be accused of remaining silent too long. Until today, I have never written a single word about my feelings on these events. I’ve wrestled with it as my silence weighs on my heart, though some friends and family know that I’m really one more tragedy away from throwing it all to the wind and moving back to the US as an activist. But this is not what is publicly known about me, much like the woman in the “Formation” video was not the Beyoncé that most mainstream fans consumed.
If you don’t believe that persistent, unyielding, soul-deep woundedness can occur from tragedies existing outside of one’s own life experience (such as the type of pain caused when children are identified as threats for their blackness and subsequently murdered), Bey’s decision to include those mothers in her video would seem loathsome. However, some things, even if they are not a part of one’s lived experience, are still part of a person’s understanding of her own life. For many African-Americans, Hurricane Katrina tore apart our sense of value as Americans. Who could watch thousands of people who look like them suffer and die in that way and emerge unscathed? I begrudge no one who writes or sings about that grief. When I saw Sybrina Fulton, Lezley McSpadden, Gwen Carr and others in that video, holding pictures of their slain children…heavens, did something open up in me. Something that cried out in pain with so many others who have yet to find a way to reach out to those women and say, “we will never stop grieving with you.”
Up until now, no one had any way of knowing how I feel about Trayvon Martin’s death. We now have an idea of how that tragedy might have affected Beyoncé. She found her way to speak it. I will find mine. Many more will find theirs. None deserve judgment.
