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Fam,
I'm heartbroken.
I'm heartbroken.
Sometimes, when we're reading or watching the news, we don't really get a sense of the destruction that COVID-19 is waging on such a deeply personal intimate level.
Because the number of deaths is so outrageous, and because most news sources are focusing on the numbers, it's sometimes hard to grasp that these are not numbers; these are people.
These are people who are irreplaceable, each precious in their own way, unique in their own way, each offering reality something valuable in their own way, for no reason other than the fact that they are HERE.
Here one moment and gone the next. They are being wiped from the human record, from existence, as though they were never here to begin with.
As though life is the frighteningly fragile thing that it is and we had been going about, cruelly, as though we were greater than nature itself, but truly we are just its ephemeral children, often wayward, not realizing that the whole point of us is to determine what love can do
what it can build, what it can tear down, what it can create, what it can heal. But selfishness is more readily available and much more appealing.
This baby is dead. This baby is DEAD.
And, with her body still warm, her family still shook by grief, Candace Owens is on social media using her death, in vain, to spread false information about COVID-19, to call it a hoax, to make her own medical diagnoses with nary a molecule of expertise
to rouse and rally her base of Black people who dream of one day becoming Massas' favored cotton picker or cane chopper or tobacco puller or indigo turner, to help them maintain the global plantation in the hopes that their wretched loyalty will qualify them for extra vittles
and even more, maybe a seat at the table in the Big House if they ensure that Black children everywhere are scorned or dead.
(See here:
https://twitter.com/RealCandaceO/status/1252233854313783296?s=20)
(See here:
https://twitter.com/RealCandaceO/status/1252233854313783296?s=20)
Skylar Herbert is the name we should say, with the deep shame that we could not protect her in life and we could not protect her in death from the desecration of the world order that has, from day one, been terrified of the dark.
May she rest in peace, if peace is ever possible.
Image description: You know this photo. Every little Black girl has one. With the hair pulled tight (Ow, Mommy! That's too tight! Girl, be quiet with your tender-headed self!)...
...into several ponytails held together by bolitas, bo-bos, click-clacks, we all call them something different depending on where in the African diaspora we live.
Baby hair slicked down accordingly with Dax or TCB or Crown Royal or Sulfur 8 or, shit, Vaseline when we didn't have those. Looking clean out the bathtub, greased down, and maybe some baby powder all on your neck and chest.
Sklyar is like that. Seen from the chest up, wearing an animal-print shirt, standing in front of the black bars of the gate of a parking lot, looking at the camera, smiling a smile so Black girl joy, that it is its own reason to despair her passing.
No, not passing: murder.
Because any unnecessary, preventable death is murder by the State, whether the State calls it that or not. For this, above all other things, the State shall never be forgiven.
Never.
