It’s Important I Remember That I’m Avoiding the Footage

From the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 9, 2014, to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, and most recently the death of Sonya Massey in Springfield, Ill., on July 6, the spectacle of police-sanctioned Black death has been a relentless reel playing on our American news programs and social media feeds. With these killings so firmly and historically rooted in anti-Black racism, it was easy to perceive these high-definition images in the antiquated black-and-white of lynching postcards past, that the output of Black death is an expected outcome of our white-dominated system. 

I don’t disagree with the underlying logic; I, in fact, understand how the mind is wired to look for such easy patterns to reduce its cognitive load. But there are aberrations which frustrate this framework and confuse people who fail to understand conscription and indoctrination, how our allegiances are most genuinely given to inhumane systems operating overhead and not to the human beings beside us breathing shorter breaths with each passing day.

When Tyre Nichols was murdered in Memphis on Jan. 10, 2023 — the event these two poems revolve around — it was no more surprising for being perpetrated by colloquial brothers, policemen who are Black. The system, in the end, is the system. It falls or bodies are felled: the police state, racism, capitalism, imperialism. Take your pick or add another. The truth still applies, but it will not set us free. Only we can do that.