Dating : Don’t hurt me. No more.

Asks for peace and civility without accountability or paths towards justice are fruitless. Yet they come anyway. Often in a 3 step pattern(expanding on the work of Rachel Cargle and Dr. Jennifer Freyd):

DENY — people will say that they are “shocked that this is still happening” or that “we should be past this.” These same folks have done no work to make that a reality, but are deeply invested in the idea that things have improved for Black people and/or don’t want disruptions to their post-racial fantasies. Worse is a complete denial of systemic racism, their complicity, and the unwillingness to work with Black folks to dismantle the systems that hinge on our destruction.

ATTACK — the first attack always comes for the murdered person. “Did they commit a crime? Were they resisting? Did they have a respectable job?” Questions like these feed false beliefs. The belief that there is any justifiable reason for a black person to be murdered in the streets, their car, or their home. The belief that respectability could save them. The belief that it was about the individual at all.

The second attack comes for protestors or really any Black person calling for accountability. Our compounding experiences with violent oppression that necessitate protests — murders by police, incarceration, divestment from our communities, medical malpractice, rewritten histories, toxic schools, social service failures, environmental destruction, etc — are overshadowed and dismissed by opinions about the right way to protest, how long to protest, how to be more strategic, etc. These voices hardly conceal the real goal — to silence Black folks and get us to stop inconveniencing business as usual. Folks may begin to doubt their anger and actions and be more quickly persuaded to stop making noise. However, we’re reminded by the organizers of Project Lets that, “being angry doesn’t mean you are being hateful, it means you love yourself enough to get upset at your mistreatment.” We should never ignore that love.

REVERSE VICTIM & OFFENDER — these denials and attacks leave only one possible result, Black people are the problem. Our calls for accountability, no matter how mild, are seen as an attack. Black people taking a knee, rising up, looting, “causing unrest”, and/or speaking out in the office or on the air is seen as a greater act of violence than the generational white supremacy and state-sponsored brutality.

This harmful shift orients focus on Black people’s actions instead of those who, as Angela Davis notes, have the monopoly on violence — police, military, government, and prisons. The apparatus of the state.

when you bleach black clothes
they turn blood red
a reminder
that chemical reactions burn

When this reversal of victim and offender is complete, and Black people become the perceived source of violence, the third attack begins. In this attack, more Black folks are jailed, murdered, beaten, or otherwise victimized by those who feel emboldened to “stop the violence” — now synonymous with “stop Black people”. Police, military, vigilantes, peers, coworkers, and people online launch a familiar assault on our bodies, minds, and spirits. We see this most devastatingly among organizers and folks on the ground who are targeted for abuse, surveillance, and assassination. Black people resist and fight back time and time again across centuries — in Ferguson, Minneapolis, Selma, Stono, and countless cities in what’s currently the United States. This activism and organizing — powered by Black women, nonbinary, & queer folk — continues to fortify the foundation for our ongoing movement towards Black liberation.

Audre Lorde wrote, “As Black people … we must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from the outside, but also against those oppressive values which we have been forced to take into ourselves.”

As we are attacked we are also fighting internalized white supremacy and anti-blackness at every turn. We are exhausted and scared, yet we are still doing the ongoing revolutionary work of dismantling our ties to the settler-colonialist ideologies of this nation — both in coalition and individually. This work redefines what it means to show up to these moments with love — starting with a love that recognizes and rejects our mistreatment. All of our mistreatment. This work will not be complete until cis folks foster safety and joy with our trans and non-binary family. Black trans women face violence from both the state and from Black cis men & women. This must end.

The vile attack on Iyanna Dior(cashapp $IyannaDIO) and the silence that surrounds instances of violence against Black trans women is unacceptable. Transmisogynist violence and white supremacy are linked and we can not dismantle one without the other. That process begins with our relentless commitment to dismantling all things that cause trans folks harm — especially the harm that we, cis Black folks, cause. In the short term, that looks like us holding each other accountable for the oppressive values we have taken in and are viciously spewing out as words and actions. It starts with us educating each other and physically stopping attacks on trans folks. It ends when we dismantle all systems that are reliant on anti-Blackness, transphobia, ableism, and other systems of oppression. This is a fight rooted in active love. We have to ride for our Black trans and non-binary family — by any means necessary. That fight has already started and we need to continue it with greater urgency and intentionality.

The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Amaud Arbery, and countless others add layers of grief, reignites a cycle of silencing Black people, and call us to re-examine how to reject white supremacy in our lives and movement. To the calls for love and peace I say that love is complex. Love is action, rage, tears, joy, accountability, fierceness, relentlessness, calm, honesty, and passion. Love should never be used to silence Black folks in righteous pain and anger.

Love means you destroy all that hurts us. Don’t hurt me. No more.