The year I turned 29 then-Tulsa Police officer Betty Shelby killed Terrence Crutcher while he stood unarmed in the middle of the street.

This summer I will turn 33, and George Floyd was choked to death with a knee over his throat by yet another man who brought a violent end to a black man under the guise of being a peace officer.

Floyd couldn’t breathe, and right now the only thing I can do is hold my breath.

Since Floyd’s death, I’ve heard from folks in my life. Some of them are white. The ones I trust in discussions about race, I talk on the phone and text with.

It’s worth noting I haven’t talked to many. Because, 99 years after the Tulsa Race Massacre, I am terrified to be a black man in Tulsa. I’ve heard from black friends who have purchased guns over the weekend.

They have decided this is the only way they can insure protection because they don’t feel their white friends will protect them.

I am a Millennial black man, and this is what my normal looks like. Last Sunday, I jumped into my truck, pulled onto the street and took the on-ramp to highway 75 in Tulsa.

I took the Peoria exit, and then took Pine to Greenwood to approach the cultural center from the northside to see the protest. The rally was one of the 140 that erupted across the country this weekend.

I didn’t participate in the Black Lives Matter protest so much as I watched others participate. They wore masks. They held signs.

They chanted together, marched together at a time when we’re all supposed to be at home for threat of a pandemic that all of a sudden is not the most threatening disease in my life anymore. Racism has taken back the No. 1 spot in the power rankings.

So many of them came to the protest later, in part, because the traffic was so fierce that the crush of cars made parking difficult.

If you approached from the northside like me, you likely would’ve found parking right away. But you’d have to know your way around the northside first.

You’d have to drive by the Hutcherson YMCA, Carver Middle School, the Dollar General, church after church and the building with the name of a historically black university on it.

You’d have to know this place, this part of Tulsa that helped raise me. You’d have to know its people. You’d have frequent it enough to know longer be considered a visitor but a stakeholder. You’d have to care on days when the rest of the world seems not to.

You’d have to care about the black folks who live here, send their kids to school here and still feel as if their fears are not taken seriously—nor our city’s history.

I learned last night that there are folks who had never even heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre—who are from Oklahoma—and the emotion that washed over me then is the most heartbroken I’ve been in all of this.

Angry and sad does not even begin to cover it.

I was enraged. I was inconsolable.

And while so many offered up the excuse of not having been taught our history in school or didn’t know about it until HBO adapted a comic book series last year and set it in Tulsa, I ask you to show me the part where they taught us how many national titles OU won in school?

Show me the part where we learned about Joe Washington’s silver shoes in elementary school.

In a state that claims not abide excuses, so many folks are full of them on this subject. And this after Bob Stoops titled his memoir No Excuses. Silence is an action. Stop being so concerned with being called racist, and give that energy to combatting racism. Become vulnerable.

You’d have to know that saying you don’t see skin color is to deny black Tulsans’ reality. I am black.

To see me, is to see a tattooed black man with muscles, a head full of locs, an affinity for skinny jeans and Space Jam 11s. Because I can’t actually wear a sign on my chest that says I’m an Eagle Scout. That I’m a graduate of the University of Tulsa. That this is my home.

I love Jason Isbell’s music, and I cling to Elmore Leonard’s novels, and I’m in pain and scared of the world.

But I am not so scared that I don’t want to know you, engage you meaningfully or have lost hope in the idea that the impossible is within our grasp. “The impossible is the least one can demand.” I didn’t write that. James Baldwin did. I just decided he was right.

OK, I'm done. That's me.