Black Trauma Won’t Gain White Warmth

Our vindication shouldn’t come at the expense of our mental health

Yesterday, I played hopscotch down my newsfeed. Ducking and dodging auto-plays of the excruciatingly violent execution of 25-year-old Georgia resident, Ahmaud Arbery, at the hands of a racist daddy-son duo, Gregory and Travel McMichael. I squeezed my eyes shut in an attempt to squish away what I knew was playing beneath them, too tired to post a paragraph begging other Black men and women to think carefully before clicking share. We’d seen far too many of these videos already, yet, word of the very graphic nature of this one caused it to spread, and with speed, I hesitated to surmise why. And as details surrounding Arbery’s murder crept into our morning coffee, his spirit’s cry for justice grew inconsolable. I had honestly witnessed enough lynchings for a lifetime. I had no interest in seeing another Black body blown into the wind.

America has done a great job of throwing her rocks and hiding her hands, then helping you look for who hit you. Not only has this country orchestrated the camera’d chaos that is the terroristic treatment of its Black citizens, but it has also gone on to live in a perpetual state of dismissal and denial. There’s something about having to prove the rawness of your lived reality that makes you reconcile with that rawness for the sake of convincing your naysayers…