Black lives matter.
The Black lives you terrorize and threaten while you’re walking around and breathing are counted among them.
Somebody’s got to care about those Black lives.
If you can be made famous for not caring about those Black lives, I guess that is fine. But I am not obligated to be silent about that fact. Because fact, it is. Because those lives matter, as well.
But let’s go on and pour out a lil liquor for the ones turned into monsters by society too, I suppose.
Indigenous cultures (that I know of, particularly in Africa), by the way, don’t move to save everyone. Only a culture in desperation, under distress, does. Indigenous culture does not call every aged person an elder and every dead person an ancestor. I will recognize systematic reasons why folk, particularly Black men, are morphed into domestic terrorists in our own communities, but I will not use that to dismiss the terror itself and the impact it has on others’ lives.
The question is begged then, why do many of us continue to ask for the maximum of excuses and patience for folk among us who cause damage to the rest of us?
I think it’s pretty simple. Because we want that cushion available for ourselves.
We want to be so easily forgiven for the horrible things we have done or are doing.
We want that unconditional dismissal for horrible things perpetuated by folk we love, directly. Our own friends, brothers, cousins, etc. Folk who we have yet to check or quite often don’t know what to do with at all, but love them and hope for them, still.
SOMEBODY has to give a damn about the impact that these brothas’ words and deeds have on the community as a whole. Yes, we are all victims of our surrounding iniquity, but you cannot leave victims empty handed by just tossing that at it. The fact is, someone has been hurt. Someone must be held accountable.
We always love and forgive brothas after they are vilified, arrested, murdered, etc.
Always.
But where is that love and effort and outcry while they are exhibiting these symptoms of the cancer within?
I’ll tell you why it’s absent. Because it isn’t real. We don’t love them. We do however, project ourselves onto them. In the same way that white folks love to try to convince us that enslavement wasn’t that bad and that there certainly were some good masters. They aren’t excusing the thing per se, they are excusing themselves.
I would bet money that the majority of folks running to champion or excuse this young man, rapper Xxxtentacion, never even listened to a single lyric or read a single tweet of his. So it has to make one wonder, what it is they’re actually defending. Some folk, I’m convinced, just have an automatic knee jerk reaction, that as soon as a Black man is criticized, they run to shut it down.
People who get harmed by wayward Black men, regardless to their age, are getting real tired of being told to blame something else or look at some larger picture, while we piece our identities, our bodies, our realities and our families back together in the wake of whatever violent or toxic actions or culture they create and support.
White supremacy’s or whatever’s effect on you does not excuse your culpability, though. I cannot now go to those peoples’ graves or therapy sessions and say, “don’t cry, he didn’t do anything to you, it was that system over there.
I want to love on and support the reform of my brothas at any point in life, for the most part, but not at the expense of everyone else. Killing the rest of us cannot be okay by just continuing to hold out hope that folk will turn over a new leaf at some point in life. And if they do, there’s still a trail of bodies (literally or figuratively) behind them.
If anything, I will mourn what became of you as a person, and mourn ourselves for being okay with it.