I am so tired of having to defend my own humanity and the humanity of my people. https://twitter.com/4lisaguerrero/status/1384735911041110019

Makhia deserved the chance to make mistakes, to learn and grow, to survive and explore. She deserved to have a side of the story, to work through why she picked up a knife, to know where she wanted her life to go and who she wanted to be. The cop that killed her didn’t care.

That’s the beginning and end of these conversations: cops don’t care; white people don’t care. She’s just a wild animal that had to be put down, not a child with both troubles and hopes. We don’t dispose of white boys this way. Hell, we barely punish white boys who commit crimes.

Brock Turner was caught in the middle of an act that *legally* can be retaliated against with deadly force. Instead, he was left alive and briefly chastised with 90 days of jail. The judge who sentenced him mourned his potential. Makhia had real potential if we allowed her to.

Black and brown people, people working toward justice, will bring out all of the examples of white men committing heinous crimes and being gifted patience, potential, and the opportunity to live. It won’t change the conversation at all.

Because Black and brown lives don’t matter to the people who will defend the killing of Makhia. To them, she was never more than her worst moment. She is forever robbed of potential, because the world didn’t believe she ever had the capacity for it.