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June 17 - June 19, 2016
That’s the story Zimmerman told. That’s the story the Sanford Police Department believed. It’s a story as old as America itself. It’s a story about black men’s inclination toward violence, our reliance on animal instincts, our general unfitness for civilized society, our preference for death and destruction.
Starts the book with the story George Zimmerman told of what happened the night he killed Trayvon Martin, illustrating how Black men's death at the hands of White people is justified because of Black men's inherent violence and criminality.
To believe this story—where Trayvon was the aggressor, a teenage boy more interested in fighting a stranger than getting back home to see if LeBron James, Derrick Rose, Carmelo Anthony, and Dwyane Wade could lead the Eastern Conference All-Stars in a comeback, that he brought Zimmerman close to death with his bare hands—is to believe the stories white supremacy has always told about black boys and men in America. You don’t need to hate black men in order to believe these stories. Black men’s humanity only need be invisible to you, so you never question where these stories came from and why
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The people who say "we don't really know happened" are relying on these centuries old stories of black men to justify their murders and they don't even know it. Why don't people know these stories? America does not teach history that makes it look bad.
The only weapons found on Trayvon’s body were the can of Arizona Iced Tea and a bag of Skittles he had just purchased from the local 7-Eleven, but it was Zimmerman, with a gun on his hip, they believed had cause to fear for his life.
White people always fear for their lives in the presence of black people
It places us in the unenviable position of wishing that our martyrs could have survived to become tokens.
And the more the image of black men is connected to everything wrong with the world, the easier it is to justify killing us. Racism comes to be seen as a natural reaction to the existence of black monsters.
He starts the book with discussing Trayvon Martin and how he didn't get to grow up, figure out who he was, make mistakes, evolve, love, hate, fail, try again, live. Any black boy in 2012 could've been Trayvon, just like any black boy in 1955 could've been Emmitt Till. Mychal's life could've been violently ended by white supremacy at 17, but he wasn't; he was able to live and tell his story, unlike the thousands who weren't able to.
My parents sent me to college to become a credit to my race. It was never said in those exact words, but the idea was planted early on that my life would be one where I would defy all of the stereotypes associated with being a black man.
This sentiment is common among many black people. We live our lives trying to defy stereotypes; go to college so as not be an uneducated black person; make ourselves small so as not to be threatening. This will not save us from death or incarceration due to white supremacy.
They never said it in those words either, of course, because they didn’t know who Barack Obama was.
Along with Trayvon Martin, Barack Obama is another main thread that runs throughout the book. In the introduction Mychal says we hoped our martyrs would grow up to be tokens, and President Obama is the biggest token of all. In response to the murder of Trayvon Martin, President Obama creates the My Brothers Keeper initiative focused on mentoring and education for black boys, as if a mentor and straight A's will keep black boys safe from state sanctioned violence. If black boys are taught to do the right thing, then whiteness will have no reason to kill them.
I didn’t see the speech, because I didn’t see any of the convention, because I thought electoral politics was inherently corrupt and useless.
What are some demands that we can make of the presidential candidates that would relieve people's suffering and set us on a path toward transformation, not simply give more money and power to the carceral system?
But the right kind of black.
The media makes black victims of state violence into what they perceive as the "wrong" type of black.
I was born in 1986 in Washington, D.C., when Ronald Reagan was presiding over the early phase of the War on Drugs. I grew up the son of a career Navy man in Virginia Beach, Virginia, during the 1990s, while Bill Clinton triangulated politics, exploded the prison population, and slashed welfare. I entered high school the year of George W. Bush and purged voter rolls.
Mychal puts his life in the context of a history of state violence against black people.
Until I found The Boondocks.
Pop culture, comics, hip hop, seem to play a large part in Mychal's political education.
Malcolm taught us that white supremacy was the enemy of self-love. He preached pride in our blackness as both a birthright and a tactic against an American system of devaluation. And he was killed for it.
What does Malcolm mean to you now and in what ways do you see his teachings or values being expressed in the current iteration of the black freedom movement?
The centrality of the black male experience in the discourse of racist oppression has been passed down from generation to generation, through our politics and our culture, and the sad part of this story is that I likely would have never confronted that history if weren’t for a bald black man from Chicago jabbing his finger into my shoulder.
In the last two years we have seen black women victims of state violence receive national attention, and the rising prominence of Black Lives Matter network founded by three black queer identified women, BYP100, which states that it operates from a queer black feminist lens; what are the ways we are continuing to see the emphasis on black male oppression & how might we better improve the centering of black women?
On the national stage, Barack Obama was steadily gaining notoriety and daring me not to look at him.
Something keeps pulling Mychal to engage with the idea of Obama. He saw early what many didn't or refused to see; that in order for Obama to get to the presidency, he would have to lie about America; lie about there being no black America & white america, lie about the root causes of problems in poor black communities
The objective was to always present oneself as being deserving of white people’s respect. Anger belonged to thugs, menaces to society. I was to be a member of the talented tenth, and therefore my anger needed to be suppressed.
Many people feel BLM should appeal to potential white allies & earn their respect; protests should not be disruptive or include cursing or include speakers who don't look the part of respectability.
None of us is exempt, even those of us who read bell hooks and claim to know better. None of us has done enough work to unlearn patriarchy and male dominance, to open ourselves up to true equality and justice, to build new selves. Because none of us has done enough to see the black women standing right there, nursing our wounds and holding the truth of their oppression.
How can black men begin to unlearn patriarchy and also begin to center black women in our liberation movements?
