Killing the Future: The Theft of Black Life

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Killing the Future: The Theft of Black Life

Wednesday, 29 April 2015 00:00
By Nicholas Powers, Truthout | News Analysis


"Tell me of the night your son was killed by the police," I asked. She sat up and a deep sorrow moved in her eyes. "I had a habit of looking out the window to see my son," Danette Chavis said. "But that night, I said to myself, 'oh leave the boy alone' and took a nap. The phone woke me up and my daughter was rushing out of the door. I followed her and saw police tape, cops standing around a body. I yelled to see if it was him. But they wouldn't let me close. Later, I went to the morgue and identified my son."

We sat in the café, a few seconds passed in silence. She looked away as if seeing him dead for the first time and I regretted asking the question. Around us, people typed on laptops or chatted over coffee. They were so carefree. How do we reach a city that mostly looks at people of color in contempt or pity, but not solidarity? How do we get them to listen?

I looked up from my notebook. "Ms. Chavis," I asked, "What do you miss most about your son?"

Making Wounds Speak

Imagine hearing that someone you loved, died. Your heart would jump in your chest. Your body would clench like a fist around their memory. How angry would you be? How loud would you yell at the sky, at God, at anyone you could blame? Afterward, you'd float in a limbo of grief until you got answers, made sense of it and then slowly, said goodbye. Gathering at the funeral, you could complete the storyline of loss.

.......(snip).......

Stealing Black lives at gunpoint is the most visible and violent evidence of history repeating in the present. To be Black in America is to be evidence of a theft. It is to be a descendent of human beings stolen from villages, stolen from their bodies, stolen from each other, sold and sold again. It is to see in one's family history, ancestors stolen from their language, stolen from their land and left as walking targets. And inevitably, we, their descendants are shot at with everything from microaggressions to all-out physical violence, from suspicious stares to racial slurs, from stop-and-frisk to bullets. ................(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30489-killing-the-future-the-theft-of-black-life