People will make excuses for just about anything, and beneficiaries and sycophants of the dominant narrative are the absolute worst about it. They say that everyone is imagining the stress, or that Black people just need to “calm down” about our existence, as if we control everything around us. My main concern has always been that people tell others about the problems, and there is a constant effort to smirk, gaslight us, and pretend that we are “overwhelmed by life.” Now that everyone is finally recognizing that we were being honest and real, they want us to “get over” the latest decade of cruelty, as well as hundreds of years of denialism. Like most Black people, I can honestly say that I have no interest in doing so until some good faith efforts are made.
In 2015, on my father’s birthday, I almost got shot by the police while housesitting, making dinner for a “friend,” and taking care of her 20-year-old cat. I had brought a book because I wanted both to cook and create a relaxed environment for the cat, because pets tend to fare better when people come by and relax with them for a while. My “friend” and I had been sharing groceries, and I had brought over her half, and started cooking so that there would be food in the house once she returned. Suddenly, without warning, I heard a knock at the door, and I opened it to two guns being pointed in my face by the Austin Police Department. Just as a reminder, I was reading a book, cooking for my “friend,” and occasionally petting an old cat when someone decided that my activities seemed “suspicious” and sent guns to attack me.
This is the moment when people would idiotically say, “As long as you look presentable and follow the law, you should have nothing to worry about, and have no problems.” Risking my humility, I had a master’s that I completed while working full-time and part-time, a bachelor’s, and a paralegal certificate. I was the daughter of two licensed attorneys who had maintained their own practice for 25 years, and I worked for the state, and was single and childless. None of that mattered when I opened the door to guns in my face, and if I had been killed, people would have come up with a reason to blame me for getting shot, despite doing absolutely nothing to make a target of myself.
Even doing the minimal activities that I have described, I could have lost the chance to explain what I was doing if one of the officers had been a little more trigger-happy. Some might say that people should be willing to explain themselves, but when there are guns in play, reasonable dialogue is not part of the conversation. Control becomes the main feature when guns are present, and during the entire exchange–including the arrival of a trauma officer who wanted to discuss the guns being pointed in my face–I kept my gaze downward so as not to look defiant. As it turns out, the individual who had called the police was not even a white person, but because attacking and hating Black people–and lying about it–are acceptable behaviors, I was forced to demonstrate deference. Doing a favor for a friend in a non-white neighborhood could have been the death of me because a neighbor could not mind their own business.
Back in the moment when this first occurred, my “friend” was appalled, but now, I notice how she talked about her discomfort of her home being searched and how embarrassed she was about her neighbor. I could have been killed, but the main events were her emotions about my almost being killed at her house. For the remainder of our “friendship,” our racial conversations revolved around my soothing her and her controlling my opinion of racism, not my actual experience. The end finally came after she kicked me out of her borrowed home and told me to shut up about racism, and then tried to pretend like there was anything left to salvage of a friendship afterwards. Essentially, because that former friend was intent on misunderstanding my different experience, we are no longer friends.
Again, I was a single, educated, childless, government-employed individual who was an endurance athlete, library patron, and a user of public transportation. I had enough money, I was sharing my sources, and at the time, I went to church–although now I refuse to spend time with hypocrites. None of that matters when all people see is my skin color and their need to control, and I have no control to change the situation under my personal efforts. Beneficiaries and sycophants are going to have to engage with their need to lie to themselves, and that is the only way that the empire will evolve from being a police state.
Chasing A Dying Empire 