Life is Your Birthright

I've been thinking about Death lately.

In this era of school shootings and devices that can deliver suffering from any corner of the world right to our hands, I think my generation is very acquainted with the Reaper.

The first time I became acutely aware of my own mortality was the death of actor Cameron Boyce. I am the same age as him when he passed. Someone I grew up watching on TV throughout my childhood here one day, gone the next. I was struck by how quickly a life can be extinguished. The pain of burying a child and living with their absence for the rest of your life.

The death of 18 year old Nolan Wells has been circulating social media and local news circuits. The college freshman went to Horn Island with his white friends for the Fourth of July. His body was finally found the following Monday and identified Tuesday. 

I remember the first time I came across the story, saw the pictures of Wells with his friends on Independence Day. Seeing that they were from Mississippi, my first thought was, "They killed him".

While there is no confirmed cause of death, there is an unspoken knowing shared in Black people across the country as this story continues. It's the same knowing when a Black person is found hanging from a tree and it's deemed a suicide.

There is a sadism innate in American racism. A sociopathic pleasure derived from wielding power over another person. 

This same pleasure colored the whippings they delivered, the postcards and songs depicting Black babies as alligator bait, and the lynchings they attended. Horrific acts of terrorism transformed into family-friendly events. Where children could take photo-ops next to a charred body. Where bones, teeth, and hair were claimed as "trophies" and sold as souvenirs. 

A sick, grotesque pleasure in befriending a Black person only to leave them for dead. There may no longer be rifles and dogs, but the hunt is all the same.

Yesterday, the school I work at celebrated the 50th birthday of one its teachers. And a comment stuck with me. "Not everyone makes it to fifty." 

In that moment, I thought about Emmett, Latasha, Trayvon, Kohen, Nolan, and the countless other Black children who will never get to eat another ice cream cone or see another sunrise or celebrate another birthday amongst their loved ones.

Black children, their faces soft with youth and the hope of tomorrow, deserve to live.

My heart keeps breaking because we live in a culture that relishes in the torture and mutilation of marginalized communities. Where death is predestined for some more than others. 

I don't have a hopeful or inspirational note to leave you with. Sometimes, we have to sit in the heaviness of our past and present. Only then can we truly understand the duty we have to make things better.