To be Black in America is to fear for your life.
As Black people, our governments give guns to people that fear and hate us, we pay them to “police” us, and are then forced to video tape as they murder us.
“So that people could see.” That’s the answer Lavish Reynolds gave when asked why she live-streamed her, Philando Castile, and her 4-year-old daughter’s bloody encounter with the police.
Lavish Reynolds is the embodiment of what it is to be Black in America.
Because Black people are documenting our own murders at the hands of police for mere acknowledgement.
State-sponsored terrorism of Black people at the hands of police is so ubiquitous and expected that Black people know that no matter why, where, or how we’ve been become the target of police, our only sliver of hope is to turn on a camera and pray that if we are brutalized and murdered that the circumstances of our victimhood are different enough from the last “viral video” of Black death to garner a hashtag and a fresh wave of outrage.
So we hold our cameras up to the faces of our badged murderers to stop people from denying the brutal truth we live–the truth that is killing us. Because we know all too well that incontrovertible video proof of our murders is still not enough for even a mere indictment–a simple declaration that murdering a Black person is a crime–much less a conviction.
Because if a person with a badge fears for their life, no one else’s matters.
And that is because American policing grew out of slave patrols. It’s because police exist to protect and serve whiteness. That is why America tolerates the obvious perversion of labeling police “civil servants” while elevating their worth of their lives above the civilians they’re supposedly here to protect.
If police are meant to serve and protect civilians, then why are they empowered to murder said civilians when they fear for their lives? Spoiler Alert: Because the people they’re empowered and encouraged to kill are Black. That’s why Dylan Roof can slaughter a church full of praying Black people then be arrested without incident and treated to Burger King while Philando Castile committed no crime and complied with police requests, yet was murdered on camera.
Because the only thing a white person with a gun and a kevlar vest fears is Blackness.
That’s why “police reform” is pointless.
The police must be de-formed, unformed, undone.
As long as our existence as Black people sparks fear into the hearts of police wearing badges, carrying guns, and empowered by the State to murder us, there will always be another video, another hashtag, another Black life lost. We will continue to be forced, as Lavish Reynolds was, to compartmentalize our fear, grief, and pain so that we can document it well enough to be believed. To be acknowledged. To be seen.
But to be seen isn’t enough. We must live.
Yet, as long as a white person with a gun “fearing for their lives” justifies murdering a Black person, while Black people’s justified fear of that reality is met with derision and calls for silence, we will never be free.
We can no longer prioritize white fear of Black people over the right of Black people to exist. Modern policing is the weaponization of that prioritization. We must disarm and disband this system. The cost of white fear can no longer be Black lives. Only then will Black people be able to exist without fear. Only then will be able to live.

