This is (The United States of) America. (cw: violence)
I was 10 years old when my 4th grade teacher separated us; walkers vs. bussers.
His voice firmed we were to flee home without looking back.
When I whispered, “Why?” Michael Olin replied there were kidnappers around the corner.
I remember my feet flying across familiar streets, terrified I’d be captured by unknown faces.
That night, my divorced parents spent the evening together on my dad’s sofa.
They cried as the TV blared and repeated the scenes of the Columbine shooting.
I didn’t understand what had happened or why, but it soon became what I expect(ed).
The rusty taste of violence never felt out of place or far away - only 13 minutes that day.
From cars being blown up in the parking lot of the apartment complex I grew up in,
To my 13 year old neighbor who hung himself after torment from his peers -
Rampage was what I thought was normal to navigate.
I still believed I lived in the greatest place on earth.
I remember when my mom sheltered our neighbor as her abusive ex hunted her.
She said I couldn’t leave the house to meet my friends for fear she’d be discovered.
I’m ashamed to say my response was irritation - her safety, my inconvenience.
I can still see the terror in her eyes and feel shame that I felt no responsibility for her.
It might have been the same year that LPD stormed our apartment while I was home alone
I grew up watching the TV show “Cops” and the way it framed them as doing good.
Entering our brown-carpeted apartment without a warrant, terrifying the children I babysat
I can still feel my 16 year old rattled breath that their uniforms and invasion brought with them
As I grew and began to cross US borders, I learned the violence I knew was just the beginning.
I met faces terrorized by the troops and guns I’d been taught to salute.
I learned stories that my family told me couldn’t be true.
US propaganda tells us violence is justified as long as the right skin, religion, flag perpetrates.
The way the stories I’d been told framed me and my fellow citizens as good colonists,
It didn’t match the costs of life, safety, water, land that ravaged the Americas I’d visited.
How US proxy wars pushed waves of migrants running for their lives across ‘our’ border,
Only to be greeted with the truth - the “American Dream” is only for white/Christian/wealthy/men.
As I met Indigenous and Afro-descendant people in América Central, el Caribe, Sudamérica,
The puzzle started clicking - colonization not a relic of the past committed by Brits and colonos.
Their stories of languages and children stolen, they echoed the little I knew about Indigenous people north of their homelands.
Reservations in fact political violence, not a natural fixture as I’d learned them to be.
Then came the murder of 18-year old Michael Brown, and my whiteness cracked a bit further.
I’m embarrassed to write I hadn’t heard the term ‘police brutality’ until 2014.
Days after his murder, I stumbled into a protest on Colfax across from my Cook Street apartment
A ‘peace’ officer shoved me from the sidewalk, and the rattled 16 year-old me flooded back.
My life has been decades of piecing together violence, how it shapes me, how it shapes us.
The way women in my lineage have (been) taught to speak little of men’s brutality.
How we dismiss racism and conceal our eyes behind our shield of whiteness.
The indoctrination that we alone control our destiny, and systems are never to blame.
Evergreen High School is 21 miles from Columbine, 28 miles from my elementary school.
26 years separate the babies gunned down & we’ve allowed thousands more be riddled with bullets.
We pledge allegiance to guns, party lines, the thin blue line and yet -
We claim we aren’t the violence that we swim in.
During the George Floyd uprisings, my cousin’s husband told me I have white shame.
Although I’ll give him little, this is one claim that holds true.
I’m ashamed that I live in and benefit from a world where my lack of melanin means safety.
The shame that I, like so many, have become numb to violence instead of disrupting it.
As love outpours for a man who spoke words of hate cosplaying as Christian morality,
I can say I do not celebrate the spill of his blood.
Instead, I brace for the wave of violence that follows when assumption of white safety is disrupted.
We all hear it; the claims that this was an act of war, the breeding cycle of violence rolls.
To my (white) family, friends, colleagues - I beg of you to ask yourselves:
Why has Charlie Kirk’s death pierced your heart in a way that thousands of children gunned down did not?
Why has your voice not spoken of bombing & starvation of black and brown bodies by our taxes?
How do you decide to care about who is the target?
Opinions that dehumanize and oppress are words that call in death;
Hateful words & jokes bleed into action
As you’re horrified by folks celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, why not be horrified
Kirk’s words meant doxxing, lynching, and breeding the brutality you claim breaks your heart?
What if this moment of being cracked open could mean room for a new perspective?
What if we critically examine the context that granted Kirk his platform?
What if the pageantry & tenderness he’s been granted - extended instead to
Hind Rajab, Emily Pike, Linda Becerra Moran.
To the babies facing immigration judges all alone
To my queer and trans beloveds afraid for their lives, their children, their marriages
To my melanated and migrant loves
I’m sorry we’ve allowed the lie to fester.
Like Childish Gambino said - This is (The United States of) America.
