This weekend Atatiana Jefferson was shot and killed in her home. She was playing video games with her nephew. Last year Botham Jean was having a snack of ice cream when he was shot and killed in his home. A few years ago, it was Tamir Rice, not yet 13, shot and killed in the park. Or was it John Crawford III, a young parent shot and killed in WalMart? Maybe it was Walter Scott, shot and killed after running away from a routine traffic stop. Maybe it was Amadou Diallo, shot and killed in a case of mistaken identity. Or maybe…
These are men and women, some children, who were alive at one time, and then they were not after an encounter with the criminal justice system. No one, to my knowledge, has claimed they were guilty of anything other than the most trivial of offenses, if at all. They are not the only such victims of murder. They are the names I remember for the moment. Others have been killed or found dead for edging into the system. Freddie Gray, Jr., got his neck broken and spinal cord severed during transport to the police station. Sandra Bland was found dead after she was jailed for a routine traffic stop. Eric Garner died by asphyxiation at the hands of the justice officer after trying to stop a fight. Philando Castile, pulled over in his car with a legitimate license to carry a gun, announced to the justice officer he had said gun, and was shot and killed in the car next to his girlfriend.
In each of these cases the victim was Black.
I’ve watched my friends express their shock, their hurt, their anger, their outrage, their fury, their fear, their hopelessness, their isolation, their understanding of their own oppression in a society that does not see them. Does not value them. Does not, from beginning to end, love them. These are men and women who are entirely whole and complete in the image of God, and the world around them discounts their voices, dismisses their pain, destroys their worth, denies the Imago Dei that is in them.
These are my brothers and sisters in life. All are beloved and worthy and highly valued. And they are shot and killed and beaten and jailed and abused, over and over again, because they are the wrong color for our America.
I grieve and I rage and I explode, because these are people I care deeply for & cannot much help. I write and I pray and I argue and I disrupt—and still the deaths go on, of those who are the wrong color in America at the hands of the justice system.
I am only a bystander. I am watching. I am grieving. I am not in that grief and hopeless and rage and despair.
And I know that their place of grieving is a place I must not enter.
My friends ask me for hope and love and support, ask me for my allyship to be something beyond a beautiful thought or meaningful gesture—but my friends also ask me to let them have their grief, their healing, their community. “Sure,” they say, “the words are nice. The promises to act are nice. The gestures are nice. But we need to just be in a place where we don’t have to listen or watch you or bear with you. We need to be with our own.”
These cataclysmic events break through the complacency that we might have turned a corner in America of acceptance. And the grief and shock and healing have to take place in private, in separation, in mourning within their family. Our friends must have their time to mourn shattered dreams and broken hearts.
I see us well-meaning white people attempting to go into these places to be a presence. I understand the desire, but such time will come later, when work has been done by our friends to live through their rawness.
The grieving must be done, first, in community.
I would encourage that we, who consider ourselves as allies or friends or just empathetic to the anguish, let our friends in the Black community withdraw to mourn. Without us, until asked. If ever.
It is still true what I posted elsewhere, quoting another white friend:
“To my Black friends: I see you. I love you. I hate this. I promise to listen to you. I vow to fight for change and for justice. You deserve to be safe.”
But they are in a place we must not enter. It is a place of holy ground and mourning, and we are not yet fit to join them.