There are no words that make the killing of 20 year old Daunte Wright explainable.
There are no words that make the killing of any black person at the hands of a police officer in America defensible.
There are no words that will help the families, friends and communities of those who have died to manage their losses or facilitate their grief.
There are no words that serve to soothe my community in Minneapolis and Brooklyn Center, Minnesota.
There are no words to mend the soul wounds inflicted on those who have been killed, tortured, enslaved, and robbed of land in order for this nation to be built.
There are no words to abate this nation of the insidious and pervasive patriarchal white body supremacy that stains our history and plagues our present.
There are no words. And there is no more room for just words.
Action is needed. Action is being demanded. Action will be painful. Action will be hard and effortful. Action will bring with it the overwhelming shame of holding ourselves accountable for what has been created in our evasion of the truth. And action is the only acceptable answer.
My action today is to share that my grief strips me of words. And that is saying something for someone as prolific in writing as I am. But my grief is strong, as the loss of another black son in our nation at the hands of a police officer looms SO LARGE. When things happen once or twice it can be seen as specific cases with circumstance that are unique. When it is handfuls of black people dying at the hands of police at rates far higher than any other racial group in this nation, it is a pattern…and one worth facing and eradicating. But when hundreds upon hundreds of our black sisters and brothers, black sons and daughters, black mothers and fathers are dying for reasons like being pulled over for a traffic violation gone bad, it is a genocide happening right under our noses.
In the early stages of grief we will often be swallowed up by our feelings. I personally feel that way right now. Like I cannot move and cannot understand how others go on at the speed of life. I felt this way when my parents died. And what got me up and moving and doing the next right thing were my children. I knew they needed me to be their mom, even when I had little left to give the world. So I shuffled one step at a time, doing just what was in front of me. “Do the next right thing“ is mantra I have advised so many of my clients to do during their grief as well.
Today, I am urged on by all of our children. I am compelled to keep moving forward, because they deserve a better world than this. So my action today is to write this blog and continue to make this platform one that is no longer tolerant of killing our black citizens. No longer willing to engage in the conversations of why this time it was an exception. No longer silent that this is a systemic atrocity of genocidal proportions that must be acted upon and changed.
That is what I can do today with this next right step in my corner of the world? What is yours?