I speak from a space of never having experienced what you have experienced — our lives are more than worlds apart. But as I sit in my office in London, in England, in my nice chair, eating my sweet potato wrap, living my comfortable life of privilege — reading your words, I felt feelings that I am not gifted enough to described.
there aren't any words enough that could bridge our divide, that would not sound condescending or stupid or f**ing ignorant.
So I am not not going to tell you I am sorry, or offer sympathy for a life and losses I couldn’t even begin to understand. because its BS — you haven't asked for my pity, and like you said this isn’t a healing zone.
So I will comment on the only thing we share — writing.
You have a gift — a gift that allows you to, for a moment, drag someone out of the world of their own experiences and into the reality of yours.
I, like so many other people, have read statistics about murder rates and poverty, and in some removed way I can understand it and I know its horrible and wrong. But what you have done, is you have given it a face — you have given these people names, you have given their deaths texture — you have given people a way in — out of the numbers and letters and into the lives of others.
People in privilege will fight tooth and nail to hold onto that privilege and if they can delude themselves into the comfortable arm chair of blaming victims for their own oppression then they need never question anything.
But when someone like you steps up and writes something so utterly compelling, so a indescribably beautiful and at the same time utterly heart breaking — you make people stop — because you aren’t giving them a statistic that they can BS their way out of — you are giving them memories of people who actually lived and actually died.
you’re article is brutal and it has deeply effected me.
never stop.
