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August 11 - August 14, 2020
He is saying that we, human beings, are literally made out of stardust.
My mother, never giving up despite never making a living wage.
My father, who always came back, who never stopped trying to be a version of himself there were no mirrors for.
What could they be but stardust, these people who refused to die, who refused to accept the idea that their lives did not matter, that their children’s lives did not matter?
We lived a precarious life on the tightrope of poverty bordered at each end with the politics of personal responsibility that Black pastors and then the first Black president preached—they preached that more than they preached a commitment to collective responsibility.
They preached it more than they preached about what it meant to be the world’s wealthiest nation and yet the place with extraordinary unemployment, an extraordinary lack of livable wages and an extraordinary disruption of basic opportunity.
And a prison population that, with extraordinary deliberation, today excludes the man who shot and killed a 17-year-old boy who was carrying Skittles and iced tea.
We will remember that Nelson Mandela remained on the FBI’s list of terrorists until 2008.
Like many of the people who embody our movement, I have lived my life between the twin terrors of poverty and the police.
carry the memory of living under that terror—the terror of knowing that I, or any member of my family, could be killed with impunity—in my blood, my bones, in every step I take.
We—me, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi—the three women who founded Black Lives Matter, are called terrorists.
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be … black, but by getting the public to associate the … blacks with heroin … and then criminalizing [them] heavily, we could disrupt [their] communities … Did we know we were lying? Of course we did. JOHN EHRLICHMAN, RICHARD M. NIXON’S NATIONAL DOMESTIC POLICY CHIEF, ON THE ADMINISTRATION’S POSITION ON BLACK PEOPLE
They will be silent in the way we often hear of the silence of rape victims. They will be worried, maybe, that no one will believe them. Worried that there’s nothing that can be done to fix things, make things better.
And I will not think of this particular incident until years and years later, when the reports about Mike Brown start flowing out of Ferguson, Missouri, and he is morphed by police and the press from a beloved 18-year-old boy, a boy who was heading to college and a boy who was unarmed, into something like King Kong, an entity swollen, monster-like, that could only be killed with bullets that were shot into the top of his head. Because this is what that cop did to him. He shot bullets into the top of his head as he knelt on the ground with his hands up.
will think of it again when I watch bike-riding Freddie Gray, just 25, snatched up and thrown into the back of a police van like he was a bag of trash being tossed aside.
Soon after the day that my brothers were set upon in the alley by cops, a new cycle begins: they start getting arrested on a regular basis, and it happens so often that my mother is eventually forced to move us to another part of Van Nuys.
He literally has garbage bags filled with weed.
When he tells me that, I try to let it sink in, living without fear of the police. But it never does sink in.
Months on, I was accepted to the gifted children’s program; Lisa was not. But Lisa’s mom was able to manipulate her address and get Lisa into the standard program, so in the end we are both Millikan students. But we don’t remain friends, not as we were.
I realize we are poor.
Middle school is the first time in my life when I feel unsure of myself. No one is calling me gifted anymore.
The year we become a thing to be discarded.
demonstrating how Black girls are rendered disposable in schools, unwanted, unloved.
But having attended schools with both Black and white girls, one thing I learned quickly is that while we can behave in the same or very similar ways, we are almost never punished similarly.
Twelve. And for me, too, it started the year I turned twelve. That was the year that I learned that being Black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready. I had been so ready to learn. So willing. Twelve, the moment our grades and engagement as students seem to matter less than how we can be proven to be criminals, people to be arrested. Twelve, and childhood already gone. Twelve, and being who we are can cost us our lives. It cost Tamir Rice his life. He was a child of twelve. And the cop who shot him took under two seconds, literally, to determine that Tamir should
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It has everything to do with being Black and nothing to do with it.
We do not process, my family, we do not take it all down to the bones of it.
And all I will know then is that I love him and I miss him. Alton with all his big emotion and laughter.
I didn’t want her to tell you, he says. I never wanted you to feel like you were half anything, step nothing. Like you weren’t mine. You’ve always been mine. I didn’t want you to feel different.
We say nothing and just eat and are silent. But the tears are a sign. Everything is changing and I feel guilty.
Gabriel tells me he lives in a home for sober adults. He tells me right away he’s in recovery from crack addiction. I know about crack.
My father’s family is a cash-poor family, unlike my mother’s. My mother’s family is middle class. The only reason that we are poor is that my mother got pregnant young, which violated Jehovah’s Witness rules, sex outside of marriage and all that. They shun her and for years she will work and work to get accepted back into the Kingdom Hall, back into love.
As I grow older I will come to question 12-step programs, see their failures, all the ways they do not reduce the harms of addiction by making their harms accrue to the individual, alone. They do not account for all the external factors that exacerbate chaotic drug use, send people into hell. The person who only has alcohol or crack at their fingertips almost never does as well as the person who has those things but also a range of other supports, including the general sense that their life matters.
Gabriel is public. Even in the moments of shame.
He always returns to truth and honesty. He talks to the audience but I know he is really talking to me, talking to his family. He praises us. He thanks us for not throwing him away, for staying by his side when he went to prison, which is how our society responded to his drug use.
From this point onward, Gabriel is immediately and continually present. After the Salvation Army graduation, he starts picking me up every single Friday and we go to Grandma Vina’s house, where there is always a huge collection of family members.
Eventually, Gabriel, who could always find some low-level job no matter what, gets a car of his own—a gold-colored Lincoln Town Car, and we’re really off and running then.
Why are only individuals held accountable? Where were the supports these men needed? Men talking about broken dreams and no jobs and feeling hated by the world and being beat up by police.
I’m not here to take you away from anyone, he tells me more than once. I’m just here to add to your life in a way that’s good and useful.
He reminds us love wins. And for me, a girl from a home of little verbal expression and even less physical expression, I start to know a freedom I hadn’t realized I needed. I start to feel something like home in my own skin and sinew, bones and blood.
prisons are supposed to make society more safe, why do I feel so much fear and hurt?
Prisoners are valuable. They not only work for pennies for the corporate brands our people love so much, but they also provide jobs for mostly poor white people, replacing the jobs lost in rural communities.
My father’s family loves me, but with only four years together, I am still not fully part of their everyday. Which is to say that with my father out of sight, so am I, and it will remain this way for all the years he is gone.
cannot go to see my father without an adult to take me and even if I could, I don’t want to go alone. Gabriel and I stay in touch through letter writing. Our letters are brief. My father always opens his in the exact same way:
Years will pass before I learn that Monte was in a full-blown episode when he was taken to jail. He was hearing voices. His mind had been folded in on itself, and shaken brutally. The jail psychiatrist is the first to provide a diagnosis that explains why Monte has these mood swings, this erratic behavior: he has schizoaffective disorder. But they do not tell us this.
There are more people with mental health disorders in prison than in all of the psychiatric hospitals in the United States added up. In 2015, the Washington Post reported that,
am 16. My brother is in prison. My new father is in prison. There are no support services for teens with family in prison.
He is a felon, they say. You have to call the police.
Marsha grabs her daughter right there on the track and attacks her, fists and feet, beating her daughter down in front of all of her friends and coach until they are able to pull her off.
Naomi is enrolled in another school, in another town. She is separated from her friends, loses her coach, and is exiled from the community that had loved and supported her since she was ten years old. And we who love Naomi, we who love her and are Queer, whether we are out or not, will learn in the harshest of ways that this is what it means to be young and Queer: You can do nothing wrong whatsoever, you can just be alive and yourself, and that is enough to have the whole of your life smashed to the ground and swept away. And all you can do is watch.
