When you impoverish an entire people, pick them off to kill one by one, and pay their families to grieve quietly, then of course history will repeat itself.

No shade to the Taylor family. They’re doing what is best for THEM, which is why picking off blacks one by one is so heinous. We all grieve as a big family. We march and mourn together. But when the family says “that’s enough,” then it just tf is.

Too bad the sadness doesn’t go.

It’s like, if the family keeps fighting, the collective eventually loses its vigor (Kendrick Johnson). If the family doesn’t take the money and keeps fighting, the deceased eventually become forgotten (Junior Johnson).

I don’t know what happens after settlements. I just watch the ebbs and flows of our communities and know the Taylor family did what was best for them. Because the alternative is lonely and hollow. The grieving becomes a silo for families. But that’s how they repeat the trauma

Blacks are a people of unity, even if the unity is rooted in pain and manifests as tension, it is a tension we ALL feel. Gangs came from pain, but the impact of gangs is felt by ALL of us somehow, in some freakish way.

So to kill one of us is to hurt all of us in some weird, freakish and indirect way. Even if the response from fellow blacks is adverse or vile, it is connected to an emotional response— a “projection”

(Excuse my use of “freakish”)

But when the dust settles, and we’re all back to being cogs in the machine that makes for murdering black folk feel like “just another day at the office”, those families are by their fuckin selves. And they don’t have US. And they have to settle to keep their peace.

Hey have to settle to keep their HOMES and their JOBS. They have to settle to keep their SANITY. Like....we may hurt for a moment collectively, but the family gets to decide when it’s over. And if the Taylors say it’s done, it’s done.

It the community still carries that pain like a collection plate. It’s like....now what? —I ask as I navigate LA which is entering its next phase of rioting after the death of a man killed by police........