When a Black mother teaches her son how to dress and how to act, you let yourselves teach them how to parent.
When a Black mother tells her son of the dangers he will inevitably face, you tell her it’s her fault. Her fault that his Black body will be carrying these black and blue bruises of his ancestors and raised scars from your grandfather and his grandfather and his great grandfather.
When that same mother has to hold her son in her arms for the last time while identifying his body you continue to say nothing.
Your condolences are empty and your justice remains separate and unequal.
You continuously sit back and let the cyclical moments continue.
As if you learned nothing from your past “mistakes.”
The mother losing her son.
The mother losing her husband.
The mother losing herself.
A motif in Black history since the inception of a practice of kidnapping and hunting. And they’re still kidnapping and hunting.
Where do we turn when the hunters are dressed as the ones meant to protect?
Protect who?
Where do we turn when the ones meant to uphold laws are the ones breaking them? Who do we turn to when our loved ones are being stepped on and young Black boys and girls are being ripped of their youth?
Why is it that the pain and trauma Black bodies endure is continuously buried? Buried in the ground where you continue to push our people.
Buried in the ground that the backbones of our ancestors built and sewed.
And you continue to step over.
Buried in the ground where you won’t give us the justice we deserve.
When we finally break the systems built up to push down, their world will be a plethora of men seething at the mouth and craving destruction.
There is only time.
And in that time education seems to be the only thing left.
See what I’ve learned, and what I am learning, is that to educate is to evolve and to evolve is to know love.
There will be no more crying over boys and girls ripped from their parents arms years before their time. There will be no more shouting our pain at the ones who won’t listen in silenced hopes of being heard.
We are the ones who must create the change, we must educate one another and ourselves to prevent the cycle from starting again.
We must put in the work and finish what our ancestors started.
The need to revel in Black and Brown joy is consistent with the need for peace.
When a mother tells her son of the dangers he will inevitably face, you will no longer stay silent. You never had the option to stay silent.
That same mother, or sister, or father, will not have to hold that
son
or daughter
or sister
or father
or mother
in their arms for what may be the last time.
They will hold them and in their arms will be joy.
Joy and peace.
In Black and Brown joy, there is love and there is warmth.
and we will no longer let the corrupt system built to destroy,
destroy us too.
I can’t thank you enough for sharing this writing. It really made me feel a magnitude of emotions that are everyday realities for so many.