This is the second in a series titled, “Until Black Lives Matter”
Maybe you’ve never stood in a church, witnessing little Black children barely tall enough to peer into a small casket file by to pay their last respects to a murdered playmate.
Or maybe you’ve never heard the blood-curdling shriek of a grandmother overcome by grief over an innocent child gunned down while selling candy or jumping rope, or struck in the head by a stray bullet while watching cartoons — brain matter and blood covering the floor where Stevie Perry, 10, had been sitting (2001).
Maybe you’ve never smelled the scent of gunfire, sweat and fear mixed in one suffocating cloud.
Never experienced that moment of silence after the chaos and terror of another shooting on the block before the eruption of screams and sirens. Never had to cower as a child in a bathtub in fear of a bullet penetrating the walls.
Perhaps you’ve never stood in the Cook County morgue, eyeing the carnage of a violent summer weekend — cold young black male bodies stacked and wearing orange toe tags (1994). Maybe never seen a custodian shoving fresh blood with a push broom on a basketball court after a shooting.
Maybe you’ve never witnessed a live gun battle as neighborhood women and children run for cover. Never seen Black human carcasses lying frozen on tree-lined streets.
Never covered the story of a boy fatally shot while making mud pies in his front yard. Never lived in a place where gunshots are as inevitable as the sunrise. Must not know the story of Tyshawn Lee, 9 (2015).
Maybe you’ve not had to bury a son or daughter, mother, father, grandmother, or a 6-month-old baby girl shot while sitting on her father’s lap — not by a white cop but by someone who looks like you, someone Black.
Maybe you’ve not grown weary of seeing teddy bear street memorials, of the ever-growing list of names of African Americans gunned down by another African American.
You couldn’t know the tragic stories of Rashonda Flowers, 6 months (1990), Dantrell Davis, 7 (1992), Tyesa Cherry, 16 (1992), Robert “Yummy” Sandifer, 12 (1994), Frances Colon, 16 (2013), and many more recent young and innocent victims of this city’s legacy of gun violence.
Because if you did, then you might understand how some Black folk find it hard to reconcile how so many of us can scream “Black lives matter” when it is clear as day that to the young Black men terrorizing Black communities Black lives don’t matter.
Ourselves victims of systemic racism, some Black folk like me understand well the complex web of socioeconomic, educational, environmental and political oppression we have endured for 401 years. We are aware that murder is mostly intraracial: Whites kill whites. Blacks kill blacks.
We are also well aware that there are those who errantly and maliciously point to the murder of Blacks by Blacks to excuse the slaying of Blacks by white police officers, to falsely accuse Black folk of being inherently violent.
But what could be more violent and evil than the enslavement, lynching, rape, murder and oppression of a race of people for centuries?
That brand of hate known as American racism — administered through American institutions and by racist police — must cease. So must the hate and violence inflicted upon innocent Black children and Black neighborhoods by a relatively small group of young Black men who are just as brutal.
We have no beef with the Black Lives Matter movement. But dead is dead.
So maybe you can understand how some of us believe that Black lives won’t matter until we fervently march collectively and find solutions on both fronts, and Black lives matter to us all.
Email John Fountain at Author@johnwfountain.com
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