Ma’Khia Bryant’s Death Was Hurtful and Expected

I walked into a Barnes & Nobles in Union Square to autograph books and an older white lady asked me to help her find books from a sullen paper list she shoved in my face.

Me.

She didn’t think that I was a customer.

She assumed I was an employee.

A worker.

Her servant.

Her help.

Not me.

She didn’t

Imagine

Didn’t assume

Didn’t think

that I was

Me.

me.

Me.

me. Me

I was listening to Ibram Kendi’s How to Be An Antiracist audiobook the afternoon before the Derek Chauvin guilty verdict was announced. I had a blunt in an airtight bag in my pocket. I am a Black author. I meet the standard for great writing by race. Nah, just kidding. But, not really.

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It is incomprehensible that a white woman, on this day in American history, at the enchoracing hour of the Chauvin verdict, and in this moment of tepid white racial reckoning amid scorching Black hurt, this elderly soul could not conceive that I would be anything than not who I was. A Black man who happened to write a book, among many other things like, maybe, sometimes a customer in a bookstore. Echoing Kendi in my head, my question was, “ is she racist, assimilationist, or anti-racsist?”

The other thought was, “still nigga.”

She apologized for mistaking me for who she instinctively needed me to be, but not for offending me. My book was in front of her face, and yet she could not see me for who I am, a Black author. The sign that announced the section of the book’s placement, “Black Voices” stood above where my book was displayed.

That was hurtful and expected. The Chauvin guilty verdict was hurtful and expected

Derek Chauvin needed George Floyd to be a black brute capable of coming back to life without a pulse or oxygen. Kim Potter needed Daunté Wright to be a Black non-violent drug offender — like George Floyd. The Ohio police officer who killed 16-year old Ma’Khia Bryant instinctively needed to believe that she was a Black brute that could only be contained by the type of Black brutality that policing exhibits. This Ohio officer knew, just like most of the world, that a verdict in a police brutality case was about to be announced. Yet, his instinctive racism could not be contained by the possibility that Ma’Khia was a Black girl who had no intention of being a Black martyr.

That was hurtful and expected. Ma’Khia’s murder was hurtful and expected

Policing has not created a way to not be associated with Black death, Black brutality, and Black hypervigilance. And sometimes, old white women are unimaginative of the multitude of ways a Black body could present itself in a bookstore. American policing is incapable of surprising us with a different way to be in community with Black people. The harm is expected.

The white woman who assumed me to be an employee of Barnes & Nobles, in her defense — Black people instinctively give white racism benefits of the doubt — she looked like she could be in her mid-seventies like my parents, and my parents instilled respecting my elders into my ethos. So, I didn’t curse her out, or sternly admonish her. I was offended, documented the hurt in the same compartment that I’ve used to situate the learning of Ma-Khia’s, Daunté’s, and Big Floyd’s death by police.

The same place I doggedly packed away the deaths of Sandra, Breonna, Tamir, and Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley Jones is where I folded this white woman’s actions. After she was given directions by the Barnes & Nobles employee standing next to me who was wearing a Barnes & Nobles apron of sorts, I took a selfie in front of my book. Couched between James Baldwin, Isabel Wilkerson, Audrey Lorde, Ta-nehisi, Chimamanda, Sistah Souljah, Ibram Kendi, and Maya Angelou; these Black authors taught me that I should expect to be hurt by the reach of whiteness.

That being a Black author offered no salvage from police bullets, knees, mistakes, or racist abuse by white people whose reflex is to see people like me as anything other than who we say we are.

Because of those Black authors I was anticlimactic and anti-celebratory at the guilty verdict of Derek Chauvin. It meant nothing to me. The insensitivity of the last sentence is not lost on me. The feelings of relief that the Floyd family must feel because of the favorable verdict matters, too. The video of Floyd’s daughter sitting on the neck of former NBA player, Stephen Jackson saying with glee and pride, “My Daddy changed the world,” interrupts the comfortable compartmentalizing that I have become accustomed to. This Black girls appreciation for the way her father will be remembered by the world matters, too. It matters beyond my jaded and deeply exhausting relationship with American policing.

But none of this matters to the instinct of racist whiteness. Little is altered. Justifications for death at the hands of policing abound. Ma’Khia had a knife. Kyle Rittnehouse had an assault rifle. Ma’Khia was killed on instinct. Kyle survived because of instinct. Ma’Khia was 16. Kyle was 17. Kyle was white. Ma’Khia was not. Ma’Khia called the police for help. Kyle called a friend to announce he killed two people. I cannot say for certain that all police officers, or at least the officers involved in these two cases, are racist, or active whiteness empathizers. But, I know they wore a badge while they killed us. And police badges have been the purveyors of the most racist forms of Black brutality in this nation’s comparably brief history.

The American tradition of racism in policing cannot be dismantled in singularities or through the anomalous convictions of police officers. Justice requires more than cops going to jail. Justice is cops not killing us because of instinct. Because of reflex. Because she was wielding a knife. Because she thought it was her taser. Because he had a wallet.

Because. Because. Because.

The causes of Black death at the hands of policing are not Black actions, or Black sudden movement. The reason we die is solely because of white instinct. The white woman who misidentified me could have been an anti-racist. She could have been actively pursuing justice alongside the masses of protesters against policing. Those actions matter, too, but they cannot stop the embedded tradition of American-ness — the notion that Black people can’t be Black authors or Black customers in a bookstore, but that we are whatever your white minds intuitively imagine.

We expect you to not believe us. And you should expect us to believe you.

José Gutierrez, a Virginia police officer pulled out a gun and pepper sprayed Caron Nazario, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. Lt. Nazario is seen and heard on video in fear of his life. He was too scared to come out of his car because he knew that the police officer would and could harm him. He expected the cop to be…a cop. Gutierrez, chose not to believe that he himself was a threat. He was in denial that he was a cop whose instinct, whose historical legacy, is that of killing Black and Brown people for whatever reason policing can contrive. Whatever the ‘because.’

Ma’Khia was killed because she had a knife. A better, and more honest narrative of the Ohio incident is that Ma’Khia was killed because that cop pulled out a gun on her. Then his instinct took over.

I wrote a book called Bird Uncaged: An Abolitionist’s Freedom Song. It’s about coming of age in Brooklyn, NY during the 1990’s, my journey to be liberated from prisons:

“…[from] cages of your own creation, but mostly [from] cages created for you. Often the two were indistinguishable.”

The cage that Black people like me need to break free from is the prison of compartmentalization. We tuck away the ways whiteness withers away our emotional health. We advocate to not show videos of Black death. We take self-care breaks from the news cycle or our social media feeds because there are these peaks of Black tragedy. We heal. Then we are cut again. We compartmentalize. Then we heal. Then we cut again.

Nothing is freeing us from the ways that white racist instincts are dictating policing or the reflexes of old white women. I got to the part of Kendi’s audiobook that spoke about being bodily racist not too long after I took that selfie at the bookstore. Both of our Black books were in eyeshot of everyone who entered that bookstore. Our Black books about racist whiteness were sitting at the same display.

She couldn’t see me as a Black author. Policing refuses to see itself as a threat to Black authors, Black girls, Black boys, Black theys and Blackness.

That is hurtful. That is expected. The instinctive white brutality is embodied.

I don’t expect policing or old white women to see…

Me.

But, I also did not expect us to not see us. Ma’Khia Bryant should be here, just like me.

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