To My Mostly White Friends, Family, and Followers
After the murder of more Black people
It’s 2:30 in the morning as I type this. It was oppressively hot as our children found their way into our bedroom to seize all the available real estate on our bed. Their bodies contort in impossible shapes. My wife has retreated onto our perpetually folded-out futon.
I am crammed between the lithe, compact body of our youngest and the futon’s arm rest, parched with thirst. Carefully prying my body free, I stagger down the hall, drink some water directly out of the tap, and return to the bedroom. I pull the chain of the ceiling fan to send the cool outside air circulating through the stagnant room. I try to join my wife on the futon, but she’s not budging. So I pick my way through the darkness to one of the vacant twin beds, choosing the one less littered with books, Legos, notepads, drink cups. But I still can’t sleep.
I wend my way downstairs and open up to the blankness of this white screen.
As I type, Minneapolis is burning. Between here and there lie hundreds of miles of northern lakes, rivers, and forests punctuated by rusting industrial cities. The oppressive heat in my bedroom has nothing to do the fires ignited there, nor with the sweltering heat of Georgia where Ahmaud Arbery was murdered by white men. The comically contorted bodies on my bed are not dead people. My thirst has a ready counterpart in cool, uncontaminated water from the tap. The stifling air isn’t due to COVID-19 or a man kneeling on my neck. I push the toddler’s prostrate body aside and slink out into the silence of this house.
I remember once that an older kid, Richie Marinelli, held me under water at the University Club pool for a long time. I remember realizing with panic that I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t have the strength to fight my way past his hands to the surface. I realized that my brain and lungs couldn’t countenance this idea, couldn’t conceptualize it. I couldn’t consciously collaborate with the idea that I wouldn’t breathe again. My brain and body would never relax or ease into that fate, as I hear happens when people freeze to death. Suffocation is something consciousness must undergo as every cell of one’s mind and body convulses against it.
Of course, Richie Marinelli let me back up again. I probably sputtered some curses but what could I do? He was a grade older than me and twice my size. At 12, he could throw curve balls that looked like they were coming right at me. I never hit a single one.
I’m still here. Tomorrow came, and the next day. My teen years were aimless and vaguely criminal. I crashed some cars, stole stuff, set things on fire, damaged public and private property, etc. I’m still here. When Chris Webber called a fourth time-out, we rioted on South University in Ann Arbor. People were throwing full beer cans at the policemen on the roofs.
I’m still here. Evening came, and morning followed. I’m still here.
A few weeks ago, I could hear the honking of hundreds of mostly white folks protesting Governor Whitmer’s stay-at-home order. I only saw pictures of them later — bald bearded men toting assault rifles, wearing military garb and Hawaiian shirts, shouting in the faces of masked policemen. At the time, my neighbor and I were walking our dogs along the river trail and we doubled back as the horns became louder. Now in the park across from our house, in the shadow of Lansing’s iconic smokestacks, I hear what sounds like Eminem playing. A swarm of street motorcycles whines its way along an abandoned highway. Then coolness, quiet, silence.
This silence is so familiar to me, so predictable to me, even as the nation burns. It’s the part of this carved up, segregated land where I reside. I was born into these neighborhoods, these silences. Lying in bed at night, I could hear the wind in the trees, a far-off train, maybe the distant strains of the Spartan Marching Band practicing on campus. I know that the white people in the news stories likely also grew up surrounded by these same oceans of silence.
It has been a kind of suffocation though, hasn’t it? Unlike actual suffocation, it’s a death that so many of us consent to. At some point, as Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck, George Floyd stopped protesting, stopped pleading, stopped breathing, and fell silent. At some point shortly thereafter, he died. But at least he was handcuffed, pinned to the asphalt. His mind and his body and his cells were raging with every ounce of available strength and intelligence and eloquence he could muster, fighting for every millimeter of space, every particle of air.
Our death has been less poignant. Buffered by the “very volumes of air and sky and grass that lay mutely banked about our home,” we are mostly safe and dead and silent. Dead silent.
I don’t want to over dramatize this experience of death. It doesn’t deserve the word death. It doesn’t deserve the word life either. Maybe undead is the best word for it. Maybe it explains white culture’s seeming fascination with zombies, because that could be us. That is us. Isn’t that part of our obsession with all the little details that come out about Amy Cooper and Derek Chauvin? She voted Democrat; he always opened the door for his wife. We want to look away, to distance ourselves from them, to buffer ourselves again in white innocence. But secretly we see the resemblance. That same infecting agent— that radiation, that parasite, that plague, that virus — lies within us.
Few of us want these cases to be added to the long litany of acquittals. Most of us want justice to be served. But isn’t it also the case that we want to reestablish the familiar silence? And our maintenance of that silence — our enforcement of it — is at the very heart of white supremacy and violence. Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd were silenced. Our silence has always been a prelude to death, a close associate of suffocation.
There can be no sigh of relief when and if these few are brought to justice. When and if the bald bearded men stop shouting and honking horns. When and if Twitter muzzles Trump, or Biden replaces him in November.
No relief, no silence, no peace. We should be gasping for air, fighting for life. And for those of us who carry on in our usual silent spaces this morning and the next, let’s remember that it is this exact same silence that seeks always to silence, to suppress, to suffocate. In schools, in public spaces, in this country. With suspensions, profiling, shotguns, knees, and nooses.
So the first step for those of us who want to see the suffering and suffocating stop is to stop our silence. To wonder about it. To interrogate it. To realize that didn’t happen by accident. It isn’t just passive complicity in the face of injustice as some have said. It is likely the silence around you right now, hiding inside the hum of a lawn mower, the heedless laughter of children, a dog barking. It is violence, built on a heritage of violence.
That it erupts in flagrant ways should not surprise or distract us.
