Silence is Compliance

And I don’t necessarily mean silence on the internet. That’s the least important place to wave your ally flag. Silence and compliance are most egregious in our day-to-day lives, but nonetheless, I wanted to say something. Anything. But saying something simply for the sake of saying something doesn’t help anyone, either. As a writer, I know that words matter, especially in a world so egregiously fucked that racism and murder have remained solid pillars of our culture for hundreds of years. The crime is and was heinous beyond words, but the roots of the crime are deeply planted in our country and cultural subconscious. Like, way deep. Like, back to the beginning of America deep.

When I first learned about slavery as it relates to American history, I felt sadness and shock. The pages of my history books were littered with images of black men and women in shackles, white men standing over them, white women standing off to the side, conciliatory or conspiring, it’s hard to tell. My history books were also strewn with stories of violence, the American Revolution, Pearl Harbor, the Civil War, and every war since. Violence, I was taught, is okay sometimes, when our nation is under threat. As Americans, we are taught to fight for our freedoms, to revolt against the kind of tyranny we originally fled. We are clearly and unarguably under threat right now. A threat against some of us is a threat against all of us…