Originally published July 10th, 2016.

This was my inaugural blog post. I had first written and published it on Facebook, when I did not have a clear direction. My mind also was not in a healthy place. I was burdened with a job I did not enjoy, a graduate school program that demanded most of my free time, and the despair of watching these police shootings. Over time, it had a deleterious impact on my mental health. 

I’ll be reposting a few of my older entries with commentary. I will soon, however, have brand new content for the world. Stay tuned and stay woke.  

I have seen the dead before, but never the dying. I think of Alton Sterling shot, blood oozing on his shirt—red on red—and Philando Castile leaning toward Diamond Reynolds in his last moments. I think of Dae’Anna watching in the back seat and realize I can’t be alone in front of my laptop screen anymore.

Last Friday, a friend from the Little Rock chapter of #blacklivesmatter invited me to a space of healing at the Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church. I’m a Christian, though not particularly ritualized in that I pray consistently. I felt the urge, however, to do so as I drove east on I-630, because I want a sense of safety that God and society can’t promise me; I want to come home to my wife tonight. This is a time of conflagration. Our churches become targets. Yesteryear it was four girls being blown to bits in Birmingham; for my generation, it was Dylann Roof targeting nine black folk in deep prayer.

White people milled around outside, watching our cars, as I was ushered in. Inside were a small group of black people that ranged from high school students to the elderly veterans of the last civil rights struggle. I sat down in a pew next to a friend and smiled at the pragmatism of the black church. 172 years ago, the Methodist Church decided a house divided could not stand. And so the split came, with the Southern portion finding Biblical justification of slavery as more slaveowners poured it. I sat in the totality of that history. Here we were—the bereaved—mourning the dying of black men we did not know, led by a black female reverend, under the watchful eyes of a stained-glass white Jesus.

I’m not going to give voice to every emotion expressed in that safe space because I wanted to respect the vulnerability the aggrieved showed that evening. There is one idea, however, that moved me— the convergence of demographic change and the rise of the carceral state.

An older woman—she wore a blue dress, and had grey mixed with her brown hair— stood and talked for five minutes about using Civil Rights Movement tactics to bring politicians to the table. She then paused for a moment, and then spoke again of a confluence; as we move toward the inevitable day where we become a minority-majority nation, we have noticed the police behaving more like a military. They sport gear that’s better affiliated with the armed forces. They lock up and kill disproportionally black people. Just as in war rights are forgotten, so they are as well with every racially profiled traffic stop, or stop and frisk, or extrajudicial execution. She ended by saying she did not believe this was the grand conspiracy of some Illuminatus, but the reflex of white supremacy.

The data gives gristle to her instincts. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” reports on the general decrease in crime rates as the War on Drugs reached its apogee. Research shows, however, no causal relationship between policy and crime reduction. Crime, in general, dropped internationally as we entered the boom before the tech bubble bust, and was not impacted by locking up black people by the millions:

“After studying California’s tough ‘Three Strikes and You’re Out’ law—which mandated at least a 25-year sentence for a third ‘strikeable offense,’ such as murder or robbery—researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Sydney, in Australia, determined in 2001 that the law had reduced the rate of felony crime by no more than 2 percent. Bruce Western, a sociologist at Harvard and one of the leading academic experts on American incarceration, looked at the growth in state prisons in recent years and concluded that a 66 percent increase in the state prison population between 1993 and 2001 had reduced the rate of serious crime by a modest 2 to 5 percent—at a cost to taxpayers of $53 billion.”

Despite the continuing decrease in crime, black men were rounded up and placed behind bars and in chains, with no impact on overall crime rates. This is white supremacy in crack cocaine form—locking up black people not because it makes society a better place, but simply because there is a 400 year habit that needs breaking.

400 years is forever for black people; it is the length of our American existence. I remain a holdout in the belief that the souls of black folk and sociological research can create the conditions of justice in this nation. As I left the black church that evening—a church not of our historical choosing, but of our necessary creation—I thought more about what I could for our dead and dying. I thought about Sterling and Castile, for the 137 black people killed this year without jury or trial, and how I could serve to bring them a justice that eluded them in their lives.

I thought about this as I drove west on I-630, and forgot to pray.