Tag Archive | #BlackLivesMatter

Return from France

Jun10

I returned to Minnesota this week after spending nearly 90 days in France. If you’d asked me in the winter how I thought my spring was going to go, I could not have envisioned what actually came to pass! But I feel very lucky to have gotten to spend the entire French confinement, as well as the first phase and a bit of the déconfinement, with Isabelle and Olivier outside of Paris.

A walk in the Forêt de Meudon

Writing-wise, I ultimately had a very good confinement. (This is not to promote any kind of if you haven’t learned a new language or launched an online business during quarantine you’ve failed at the pandemic sentiment. No one needs to do anything more than do their best to make it through.) I sank back into drafting what I hope will be my next book, and when it looked like the finish line might actually be in sight, I strove to cross it. I finished the rough draft (emphasis on rough) on my last full day in France. Toward the very end of my stay, I also made two short story sales within a week; I hope to have more to say about those stories soon.

I have returned, of course, to a country still grappling with COVID-19 and lit by a renewed uprising against violent racism and police brutality. I have returned to the city that sparked the latest protests. Like I said at the beginning of the pandemic, I don’t have much to say that others aren’t already saying better. But we must all be doing the work. Here’s something I wrote almost exactly three years ago when the police officer who killed Philando Castile was acquitted. I think we need to be thinking seriously about what role, if any, police forces should have in our cities. What would it take to abolish the police? In the meantime, take care of yourselves, your family, your friends, and your communities.

 

No Justice, No Peace

Jun17

For the past week or so I’ve been reading Angie Thomas’s debut YA novel, The Hate U Give. In the opening pages of the book, 16-year-old Starr and her best childhood friend Khalil, both black, are driving home from a party when they’re stopped by a white police officer. After being ordered and half-dragged out of the car, Khalil goes to open the door to ask Starr if she’s okay, and the police officer shoots him to death. The rest of the book details the aftermath of Khalil’s death, Starr’s decisions to speak out as the witness to the shooting, and the complex relationships among Starr’s family, neighbors, and friends both in her neighborhood and at her mostly white suburban prep school.

Yesterday morning, I was riding the bus to campus and had reached the last pages of the book. I got to the second-to-last page:

It felt like the narration had broken a wall. Up till now, it had been about the fictional Khalil, but now it was about real people. As my gaze traced this litany of familiar names, my memory filled in surnames where I knew them: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice (twelve. years. old), Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, and then… Philando Castile.

I flipped to the front of the book; when had it been published? Just this year. Philando Castile was killed a little less than a year ago, which means Angie Thomas must have added him to this list in a later draft of The Hate U Give (maybe he wasn’t the only one she had to add).

Philando Castile was from St. Paul, MN. He worked at a school, where he was a beloved figure. I remembered the protests that happened last summer outside the Governor’s Mansion on Summit Avenue, right near where I used to live. I remembered the four-year-old girl who’d been in the back seat of the car when the police officer shot Philando to death and who’d tried to comfort her mother, who was streaming her partner’s death on Facebook Live. And I thought about how over the past few days I’d been reading Star Tribune articles about the jurors’ deliberations in the trial of police officer Jeronimo Yanez. The jury was struggling; the judge was advising them while turning down certain requests they made. This was happening right now, and here was Philando’s name in the book in my hands. Tears sprang into my eyes, and I thought I was going to cry on the bus.

After lunch, I read in the Star Tribune that Yanez had been acquitted on all counts. And I was not the least bit surprised. But my heart ached. In The Hate U Give, the police officer who kills Khalil is never even charged. Angie Thomas could not have written the book any other way.

There was no justice for Philando. This is wrong. Our country is sick. I don’t have eloquent words to offer, and my voice isn’t among the most important on this subject. I want to have Starr’s hope, and I think, somewhere, I still do. But right now it’s these words from The Hate U Give that are echoing in me: How? I don’t know. When? I definitely don’t know.