I know that we never met,
we are forever strangers to each other,
and yet I feel the urge to write to you.
For nearly a month after George Zimmerman
decided he had the right to take you from us
your name went virtually unmentioned.
For this I apologize. It is easier to talk big
about defending ourselves against imaginary
enemies, so much more satisfying to laugh
at the decadence of reality TV stars, so much
simpler to point our virtual fingers at radio
pundits, safely propped up on our fabricated
moral high ground, entrenched light years
away from the point of impact where beautiful
young boys are erased for being black.
There is so much less at stake in these
diversions then there is to admit that we
Sean Bell’ed you, Ramarley Graham’ed you
Amadou Diallo’ed you, Troy Davis’ed you,
Oscar Grant’ed you, Emmit Till’ed you,
only you hadn’t even been so bold as to get
sassy with a white woman, your transgression
was to buy a bag of Skittles for your little brother.
Maybe we could not have stopped
George Zimmerman from robbing you
of a future. Maybe we aren’t yet wise
enough, evolved enough to cast off
500 years of colonial conditioning,
but to let your assassin walk away
without questions or charges pressed is like
chaining your body to the back of a truck
and dragging you across the town of Jasper, Texas.
I wish I could have known you, to be there to tell you
to stay put, to remain with your little brother while
I go to the store for you, the bag of Skittles are on me.
But this would not cause men like Zimmerman to annul
the bulls-eye they’ve drawn on the backs of black boys.
I wish I could tell you that it was all just an accident,
proof of the danger of pampering our fears,
but I would have to ignore the Orlando Barlows,
the Aaron Campbells, Jaime Gonzalez’s,
the Stephon Watts’s, the Antwain White’s,
the Arthur McDuffie’s, Travis McNeill’s.
I’d have to pretend we don’t live in a world where
pretty Puerto Rican boys are beheaded because
of their sexual preference. I’d have to adopt the
imperial
art of selective amnesia to see this as anomaly, as
“tragedy.”
If only I could offer you another option,
a place where sweet, melanin blessed children
can buy their brother a bag of Skittles
and make it back across the street with their
hearts still beating, their futures still beaming,
able to return to the loving arms of their families
without a defibrillator pressed to their chests,
a place where black children with almond smooth
skin and curious tenderness in their eyes
cannot be perceived as a threat to the public,
where a white man with prior convictions
can murder black babies and walk free,
while thousands of brown skinned men
rot in prisons around the country without
ever having harmed another human body.
I desperately want for all of this
to make sense to you, but I need this
to make sense to me too, because I am
deeply uneasy taking residence on an Earth
where young black princes are used
as target practice, and the pain
their parents are almost bio-illogically
required to endure is offered no air time,
no justice, no recompense for their grief.
But I cannot undo the did. I have only the space
to feel ashamed of those among us too blind
to see that young black teenagers such as you
possess more courage and dignity and grace
than the self-loathing men who murder them.
And so I ask you to forgive us knowing full well
this kind of absolution is entirely undeserved.
First published in THE ARTS UNITED, 2012
