They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Parked next to me was a car with a confederate flag decal in the window, and I wanted to tear it off. In that moment, I wanted Dylann Roof to be dead, in the street. I wanted the police to find him and kill him like they’d killed for less before. I remember this, sitting in my home state, where I was first called a nigger, and scrolling through my phone with unsteady hands, thinking of black children playing dead and black people not playing at all. Thinking of fear and prayer and that which will not save us no matter what house we yell God’s name into, and I wanted Dylann Roof’s death to be immediate then, and buried under the names of everyone’s life he cut short. But that was a long time ago. The state is going to kill Dylann Roof, and my desire for his death has long passed. I don’t want him to die unless he can, somehow, carry the insidious spirit of his motivations, which rest deep inside of America’s architecture. Everything else feels like the cruel theater of revolving death, which the death penalty often falls into. But I knew what it felt like, for a moment, to wish for a death to cash in on. To want a body as sacrifice, something to help dull the noise, to even a score that could never be evened. I glimpsed, for a small moment, what it must be like to consider someone I didn’t know as less valuable living. And the impossible weight of it all.