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I REMEMBER EVERYTHING: A Thread
The worst part isn’t the negative interactions w/ police. It's the recurring nightmares that are impossible to forget.
A great memory is mostly a gift. Here, it's a curse. It means you're constantly haunted.
A thread
(1/14
The worst part isn’t the negative interactions w/ police. It's the recurring nightmares that are impossible to forget.
A great memory is mostly a gift. Here, it's a curse. It means you're constantly haunted.
A thread
(1/14
I REMEMBER the horror of seeing my older brother get sent to the hospital by a policeman who split open his left temple with a MagLite because he fit the description (even with his work uniform on) of kids who got into a fight earlier in the night. (2/
I REMEMBER my other brother (RIP) recounting to me his 1st arrest. Cuffed, thrown into the cop car & taken to jail because of “warrants” they insisted belonged to him. But the cop refused to check if the name on my brother’s license matched the name on the warrant. (3/
My brother’s name...Chinedum Chibuike Chukwunonso Onwuchekwa….and in 2003 there weren’t a lot of folks with that name moving around Huntsville, TX.
I REMEMBER the horror of staring down the barrel of a policeman’s gun at 17 years old, and then not being able to see it..(4/
I REMEMBER the horror of staring down the barrel of a policeman’s gun at 17 years old, and then not being able to see it..(4/
not because he lowered it, but because it was too close to see. Pointed inches from my temples with my car door ajar. I could feel it on me the way you feel a piercing stare from someone behind you. I didn’t look at the policeman because I didn’t want to HIM to feel like...(5/
I was challenging him. So I kept staring at the place in the distance. Apologizing for MY carelessness. The crime?
Asking for directions because me and my friends were lost in downtown trying to get home. (6/
Asking for directions because me and my friends were lost in downtown trying to get home. (6/
I remember the strange sense of sadness and solidarity that comes from realizing every black man I’ve ever started this conversation with doesn’t respond with the scripted sympathy you get from customer service requests “I can’t imagine how that makes you feel”. Rather, (7/
everytime I start with someone that looks like me, it turns into tennis match where we volley these horror stories back and forth with smirks and smiles—not because they aren’t uniquely horrible. They are. We don’t cry anymore because the stories are unsurprisingly common. (8/
It’s the horror movie you’ve seen 100 times. You're so familiar with what happens next, you don’t shriek where other people do. You now laugh at what other people shriek at because you look past the horror and notice the things that are humorous about the situation. (9/
I REMEMBER how all of our stories ended the same way. We were reprimanded and lectured on how to avoid precarious situations like this one, and the men who caused our terror and trauma were free to go their way. They went home to their dinner tables unbothered, unscathed. (10/
I didn’t received widespread sympathy about stories like these until the summer of 2020, because asserting any kind of pollution in our justice system seemed like an attack on right and wrong itself.
I remember reading Michael Eric Dyson’s summation of this horror, (11/
I remember reading Michael Eric Dyson’s summation of this horror, (11/
“the history of race would yet again be condensed into an interaction between the cops and a young Black anybody from Black anywhere doing Black anything on any given Black night [This] perverse predictability that mean any Black person can be targeted anywhere at any time” (12/
I'm a black man. I'm a father. I'm a Christian. I'm a pastor. I'm a business owner. I'm an American.
I do not trust the police.
It's not because I don't feel like there aren't good ones. There are. (13/
I do not trust the police.
It's not because I don't feel like there aren't good ones. There are. (13/
But it seems like the only time the good ones talk about the bad ones is when they're trying to defend their own goodness.
Until the good ones make it their aim to preemptively point out and root out the bad ones, they'll have my compliance, but never my confidence. (14/
Until the good ones make it their aim to preemptively point out and root out the bad ones, they'll have my compliance, but never my confidence. (14/
