Am I Next?

In late 2014, seemingly overnight, my Tumblr dashboard mutated into a makeshift alarm system for tracking every single public funeral, vigil, and protest being held across the country to mourn the black dead, spearheaded by Black Lives Matter, and those close to the slain. Do you know what it’s like to sit with strangers and to grieve men, women, and children you know nothing about? Neither did I, until I realized something in the midst of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile’s shocking and excruciatingly publicized deaths last week. It didn’t matter if we were all strangers, and it didn’t matter if we’d never see our threshing-floor companions ever again, or even remember their faces and their names, because we all share black skin. With every passing day it sets in more and more  that my race is a brand I can’t scrape off. Funeral services left and right double as economy events, where the living grieve the dead, as well as those among them who could be next.

Am I next? Is she next?

It marks me as the potential face of the next Tumblr funeral blast. It is a tattoo of a bull’s-eye, and I’m afraid it will get me killed one of these days. You know, it’s easy to laugh it off as just a humorous little bit when you hear a black friend talking about being arrested for “walking while black.” If you’re white, you may even feel like part of the changing tides if a black friend is looking you in the eye trying to get you to laugh about something you were raised to do everything in your power to avoid discussing. But the sad part is, your friend may die at the hands of a police officer before any one of you can say “civil rights.”

I’ve been hearing a lot of people talking about how the “liberal” media shouldn’t make Philando’s death “about race” because he supposedly matched the profile of an armed robber on the run police were hoping to catch. But see, these grown men started playing “Cops and Robbers” like it’s real life, and since Philando was a born robber in their eyes, his death probably seemed like a fitting conclusion to their chase. Perhaps it even felt like justice, because of all the ideological and political slips and slides I don’t have the energy to discuss but which we will, however imprecisely, call white privilege here.

But it’s not justice. And it is certainly more than white privilege. It’s white innocence.

Functionally, a white man’s racial innocence and his gun differ in their impact only in scale. With a gun, you could shoot one black man. But by encouraging people in our communities and families to sit idly by, passive and unfeeling, worried only about their own material wealth and safety, white innocence accomplishes what it does by victimizing, vilifying, and depriving folk of color. I mean, it is easier now than ever to hide racist intent forever in the undertones by talking about criminal activity, economic insecurity, and community disrepair as issues of class and not racial bias. Why, you ask? Review your Reaganomics 101.

White innocence is something that has been observed and remarked upon by many scholars and commentators of race relations throughout the history of the United States, from DuBois and Baldwin to Harvard professor Robin Bernstein and Princeton emeritus professor Cornell West. It has various tributaries, both historical and contemporary, which nourish it, like the long-standing national sentiments of exceptionalism, entitlement, and cultural supremacy that have functionally made this country into what we know today to be a home that is quickly breaking …

… if it was ever indeed a whole.