On Footage of Modern Day Lynchings

Please stop sharing violent images and footage of Black people being murdered. We don’t need to see more of it to know it’s happening. It contributes to a dehumanization of the Black body and perpetuates the traumatic suffering of the Black community. White people used to watch live lynchings for entertainment - in what world would showing the live brutalization of Black bodies suddenly, instead, garner empathy? No.

Instead, ask yourself and your friends what you are doing to raise children who won’t kill mine someday. Instead, ask yourself and your friends when you will care as much about Black people who are still alive as much as you care for those of us who are dead. And ask yourselves how you would behave differently if you truly did.

Instead, ask yourself and your friends how you can help beyond your finely tuned social media posts that demonstrate just how woke you must be, how you’re surely not part of the problem, how devastated and surprised you are at the state of things.

Instead, ask yourself and your friends how you could’ve possibly not known unless you too had been ignoring or dismissing or invalidating the voices and cries of the Black community pleading with you to hear us: RACISM IS NOT DEAD AND IT IS AS URGENT A CRISIS AS IT HAS EVER BEEN. Unless you too bought and served the lie that Black people are responsible for and deserving of the treatment they receive in this world, so you could remain absolved.

Instead, ask yourself and your friends to listen more deeply when a Black person points out injustice, to realize that we see things that you have had the privilege of remaining harmfully ignorant of, and to be humble enough to realize that you have a lot to learn.

There are just... so many other options.