No One Is Safe

We are all learning, slowly but surely, that you cannot contain gun violence in America.

My head and heart would ache when people described my 2019 book, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, as prescient. They meant that the book seemed timed perfectly for a country that watched George Floyd get killed. Didn’t they understand, I thought, that it will always be on time to write about the dangers of living while Black, no matter how much joy we hold on to? America has been killing Black people since its inception ad infinitum. Breathing in the face of that is all we—Black people of the United States—have ever known of living.

Several years ago, I committed to not watching the footage. I didn’t see the Akron police riddle Jayland Walker’s vulnerable back with bullets last week, inflicting more than 60 gunshot wounds. But by accident, when I was too distracted to change the channel, I saw the people in Highland Park running for their lives from a mass shooter on the Fourth of July. I heard my own crying, loud and ugly, before I had time to process what I was feeling. Just families out for a parade, the joyous sound of a klezmer band, then the gunfire pops and the screaming. Terror is an American familiar.

There is the particular heartbreak of American racism, and there is the general heartbreak of American violence. Heartbreak squared. There is also the collision: the voices immediately saying of Highland Park, This is a safe neighborhood, meaning not like Chicago, meaning not Black, not poor, not overrun by illegal handguns, not like the people we expect to die. To my ears, those voices are only a hair’s breadth away from justifying Jayland Walker’s horrifying death, a summary execution for running. If you shoot at a person and inflict more than 60 gunshot wounds, you are trying to do more than kill them. You are mutilating, desecrating, trying to completely eradicate that person and whatever you take their life to mean. We—and here I mean the particular Black we—noticed that Robert Crimo, the Highland Park shooting suspect, was taken into custody without a single shot. We know what the collision means. Heartache squared.

Some people are far more vulnerable than others. Those who are further from whiteness, wealth, gender norms, able-bodiedness, and citizenship bear the brunt of harm in the United States. But when you create a nation that fetishizes firearms and rejects interdependence, respect for all, and the public good, no one is safe. We are all learning, slowly but surely, that you cannot contain this easy-bake gun violence.

I don’t mean that as a way to cluck disapprovingly at those who are only belatedly recognizing the fragility of their human bodies. Instead I want to implore us—and here I mean the general us of an American, or better yet global, public—to enter into a season of transformation.

I hope that people become cracked open enough to turn away from shoring up their own security—status, wealth, property, citizenship, legal documentation—and allow the opening created by this unrelenting terror to grow into empathy and solidarity. Because no one deserves this. No one.