Screaming Without Words: a Movement Born of Desperation

In my dreams, I’m screaming but only hoarse air comes out. I can’t call 911 because I can’t remember the number. I try to pick up my car keys, but my fingers have forgotten how to move. The lights go out and I’m trapped. My body is violently shaking, but paralyzed. I concentrate all of my energy into my right pinky finger, which sends a sudden jolt into my right arm as my neural functions decide it’s acceptable to move again. I wake myself up by slamming my right hand against the wall and have bruises in the morning. [1]

“Riot[s are] the language of the unheard.” As someone who IS heard, I can no longer stand in silent support of my Black friends.

It’s easy to dismiss the entire Black Lives Matter movement as angry criminals who can’t see that they’re defeating their own purpose — because maybe if they had a job, they wouldn’t have to protest, amirite? And how dare they inconvenience ME by blocking the freeways!

If you want to take the lazy way out, stop reading here.

If you have the ability to put aside your own prejudices and beliefs, pretend for a moment that — like my hand slapping against the wall to jolt myself awake — the violence of the Black Lives Matter riots is born of pure panic and desperation. It’s been fermenting for centuries and is a last-gasp wakeup call to society.

This weekend’s violence on I-94 in St. Paul wasn’t formulated in a vacuum. There are two worlds in America: “one of the well-to-do and another of the struggling.” The violence arises “from a generation that feels, with some justice,” that “they are at best tolerated in schools, feared on the streets, and almost inevitably destined for the hellholes of prison. They grew up hungry, hated, and unloved, and this is the psychic fuel that generates the anger.”

I am passionate about nonviolence and cannot wholeheartedly approve and support violent reactions, protests, and riots. But you know what? That opinion comes from a place of privilege and power. I have the privilege to sit on my White throne and speak down to the people who are risking their lives on the freeway. I have the power to sit here and formulate a well-reasoned opinion based on nine years of education and another four of practice in criminal courts.

I therefore refuse to denounce BLM. My personal disagreement with the actions of SOME members (but certainly not all!) is tempered with understanding. With compassion. With the knowledge that I have no idea what it is like to be a Black person, a poor person, a marginalized person.

If you’re the type who thinks “those people” in BLM need to give up their violent tactics — or worse, “those people” need to stop killing and committing crimes against each other — I encourage you to ask yourself two simple questions.

First: HOW? How will your condemnation and anger at BLM change the world? How will it bring peace to people who have been oppressed for centuries? When will it stop? When all Black men are incarcerated and Black women are sterilized at puberty? [3]

Second, WHY? Why are Black people throwing fireworks? Why are Black people accused of committing more crimes? [4] Is it because poverty and racism have necrotized Black society for centuries? Or is it because there is something physically different about Black people that cause them to become criminals? [3]

If these questions cause you to admit that maybe, just maybe, you are implicitly biased and support a racist system, [6] I encourage you to go outside your world. Get outside your box. Get to know someone filled with anger. Talk to the people who threw the fireworks at police. Find out what it is that makes them tick.

What if we stopped ignoring the slums, stopped imprisoning people who self-medicate with drugs, considered drug addiction a health issue instead of a crime issue? What if we work harder to rebuild communities that are broken and shattered inside and out — not by lording over Black people, but by simply asking how we can help?

I get it. I was you. I found it easy to ignore the other world until I became a public defender. But there’s something about building long-term trust-based relationships with people that forces you to take a hard look at where that person came from, why they did the things they did, and how you can help prevent it from happening in the future.

My heart is so heavy. I realized on Thursday evening that it’s grief. It feels like when my dad died — a heavy, leaden feeling in my heart making it hard to remember to breathe. Maybe it’s the violence and sadness of the video. Castile’s eyes gazing at nothing. Yanez screaming, “FUCK!” with rare panic for an officer in these videos. Diamond calmly asking Jesus to save him. Diamond crying. Diamond screaming. DaeDae comforting her. Or maybe it’s because it happened a mile from my work. For whatever reason, this is causing actual grief.

And the fact that I’m allowed to feel pure grief unadulterated by fear simply shows my power.

I have a dear Black friend. He first learned to fear police and first learned that he was different when he was only thirteen years old, sitting on a picnic table near his house in a wealthy neighborhood. A passing officer demanded that my friend produce identification and proof that he lived in that neighborhood. How dare he Sit On A Picnic Table While Black! Since then, my friend has learned that despite his financially privileged upbringing, police are not his friend.

I recognize my inherent power, and you know what, White people? It’s time that you do too. You have privilege. This is not an opinion. This is fact. It doesn’t mean you’re bad, doesn’t mean your life is easy, doesn’t mean you haven’t worked hard for everything that you have.

What it does mean is that you can usually go into a convenience store without being followed; that people don’t cross the street when they see you; that you’re not automatically considered a suspect because of your “wide nose”; that women don’t clutch their pearls and purses just a little closer when you pass. It means that you’re not pulled over for “going the speed limit too fast,” or “looking like you were going to change lanes without a signal.”

There’s no simple answer to the vicious cycles of poverty, racism, mental illness, drug addiction, incarceration, and death. But we can start with one person at a time. Recognize that each of us have different skills, talents, abilities, and reaches. I’m never going to be a politician, but maybe you are, and you can enact change that way. Maybe you’ll rescue a dog and start a dog park in the ‘hood and make friends and stop a shooting someday because you reached the right person at the right time.

Finally, all of you damn well know that my compassion for Black people and anger against the system that oppresses them does not mean that I am anti-police. My heart breaks for Yanez. My heart breaks for Dallas, for Michigan. I am passionate about police reform not just for the positive effects it will have on people in the community, but also because more police officers die by their own hands than in the line of duty and traffic accidents combined. Any good police reform will include (at the least) mandated therapy and psychological evaluations to help officers process their trauma. That cause of violence cannot be overlooked.

In the end, police choose to be police. Black people do not choose to be Black. They have been screaming without voices for centuries and I have no moral right to sit on my White throne and judge their tactics. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, may we all seek change instead of revenge. May we all meet and speak to and learn with an open heart from the people that we find so easy to marginalize.

President Roosevelt famously cried that the glory belongs to the “man in the arena.” So get out of your living room and into the streets! Stop reacting in anger and start responding with compassion. Share in the blood, sweat, and tears of your fellow humans. Like Minnesota Police Chief Lee Sjolander says, “No separation. Everything and everyone is equal . . . Make the world a better place for everyone.”

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1. I have had this same dream with sleep paralysis about once a month for the past twenty years. I accept donations for therapy bills.
2. “The ardent race-denier may counter by suggesting that black people as a whole kill more black people than white people kill white people. This person, however, is forgetting about the strong correlation between poverty, systemic abuse, undereducation, limited resources, and avenues for mobility, all those things, and crime. And, this person is further misremembering the American history that preceded The unfortunately decaying Civil Rights Act of 1964, and how it is in large part dominated by the subjugation and oppression of black individuals, America’s most impoverished group.”
3. If you believe this, well, fuck you. (Sorry for swearing, Mom, but you’d probably say the same thing.)
4. Follow this page. Like, now.