On the Topic of “Killing Each Other”

Hello friends,

I know it’s been a while but frankly, this pandemic is a lot. And it’s not like the news helps AT ALL. However I felt the need to speak on this since it’s come up once again, albeit this time from rapper Waka Flocka. 

Mr. Flocka is only the most recent celebrity to come out and say something as, frankly uninformed, as this but by no means is he the first. And unfortunately he won’t be the last. But that’s respectability politics for you. 

Yes black people kill black people. 

White people also kill white people. 

Latinx people kill latinx people, if you can believe that.

And so on and so forth, everyone killing people who look like them most. This is due to a number of factors I’ve covered before, least of which include your proximity to people who look like you.

That is not today’s point.

Today’s point is that white people are the overwhelming majority. 

The point is that they feel they can kill Black people, or people of any other color for that matter, but today, specifically Black people, in this moment (this moment being all of history in general), without repercussion. History not only teaches this, it reinforces it.

You’d think the principle of studying history so it doesn’t repeat itself would be relevant here but that, dear reader, is where you would be very wrong. 

See slavery from 1619 to 1865. 

See Tulsa, Oklahoma and the burning of Black Wall Street in 1921 from which we have never fully recovered. 

See why The Negro Motorist Green Book (the real one, not that headass movie), originally published in 1936, was actually a life and death necessity for Black people traveling around this country. 

See the Jim Crow South in the 1950s and 60s. 

See the brutal beating of Rodney King in 1991. 

See Trayvon Martin and Alton Sterling from 2012 and 2016 respectively. 

See Breonna Taylor and Daniel Prude from a mere five months ago. 

White cops in particular understand they can kill Black people, guilty or not, with impunity. History unequivocally tells them so. Chika, a superior musical artist and rapper, said it well when she replied: 

So yes, Black people kill Black people and it’s a problem that is not good. But you know what is a LOT more pressing at this moment, the amount of cops killing Black people. The racism that persists because of this line of thinking.

That’s just like saying “blue lives matter” (I am begging you to never say this in my presence. I may roll my eyes so hard I go permanently cross-eyed). As if being Black is an option the way being a cop is. As if you can take off your Blackness in the same way you can take a police uniform off at the end of the day. As if the generalizations levied against cops are as drastic and unsubstantiated and racist as the ones against Black people. As if you can decide not to be Black today, to call out sick from Blackness, the way you can decide not to be a cop or call out sick today to nurse a migraine. Try, as James Baldwin famously said, being in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time… simply from being Black in this country and “relatively conscious.”

Not to mention the fact that at this point, freedom is going to have to come at the hands of white allies and those in power because we have been working toward this goal for decades by ourselves and have only gotten a fraction of the freedom we so fully deserve. 

Please save this topic for when the biggest threat to Black people dying is only other Black people.

Thanks for coming to my written TedTalk.

xx