Category Archives: Black Lives Matter

The Brooklyn Liberations Protect Trans Youth rally at the Brooklyn Museum on June 13, 2021. Photo: Michael M. Santiago / GettyImages/Getty Images

Let today be the last day that you ever doubt Black trans power, I cried into a microphone in the summer of 2020. I was addressing a crowd of nearly 15,000 people dressed in varying shades of white outside the Brooklyn Museum. Our uniform paid homage to a 1917 NAACP silent march for Black lynching victims. Now, more than a century later, we had gathered to honor the Black transgender people murdered during the coronavirus pandemic and before it. We chanted the often overlooked names of folks like Layleen Polanco, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, Dominique Remmie Fells, and Riah Milton. We imagined a world where Black trans people didnt have to fight so hard to exist.

The Black Trans Lives Matter rally sprang from the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd, but the movement is anything but new. Since the emergence of BLM, trans organizers had been building a national network to combat discrimination and violence in our communities. A month after a verdict was reached in the George Zimmerman case, New York activists mobilized around the killing of a Black trans woman named Islan Nettles on the streets of Harlem. You can find work like this happening in every corner of the country groups like the New Orleansbased House of Tulip, a collective committed to finding long-term housing for those who need it, or Atlantas Solutions NOT Punishment Collaborative, which supports the political education of trans people. In the spirit of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnsons historic STAR House, the Knights & Orchids Society in Selma, Alabama, takes a holistic approach, helping Black trans and queer people access food and gender-affirming health care, among other basic human needs.

The past few years have been complicated. Ive never felt more connected to the Black trans community and more disconnected from the wider population, which so often ignores our struggles. With each passing year, we reach record new highs of murders in our communities. But we continue to fight. And that day in the summer of 2020 will forever serve as a bridge between the rich history of the Black trans movement and a more liberated future.

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Black Trans Lives Matter and the Cry to Be Included - The Cut

Activist Ieshia Evans in July 2016, in Louisiana. Photo: Jonathan Bachman/REUTERS

In 1892, at the height of the lynching crisis, Ida B. Wells proclaimed that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.

The critical point for me in Wellss manifesto for Black self-defense is not her overarching respect for the power of guns. It is her observation about where the aggression begins. Losing that thread of the argument, about who actually starts the fights, is the reason so much white aggression is seamlessly restyled as the right to stand ones ground, to protect and defend ones kith and kin. Conversely, Black self-defense is transposed into an act of unjustified aggression and met with fire and fury by both the state and self-deputized white citizens.

Do Black people have the right to defend themselves against acts of hostility and aggression, especially when the aggressors are white? When confronted with increasingly normalized acts of white aggression, do Black people have the right to stand our ground?

Philando Castile told the officer who pulled him over for a traffic stop that he had a firearm, which he had a permit for. The officer killed him anyway. In 2014, police killed John Crawford III inside an Ohio Walmart for aimlessly carrying an air rifle that was sold in the store, perhaps considering whether he wanted to buy it. And certainly, Tamir Rice is one of the youngest victims of our cultures excessive fear of Black men and boys with guns, even though his was a toy and he was only 12.

The answer to white aggression cannot, under these circumstances, be more guns. But the decade since Trayvon Martins death has been marked by exactly this: more guns. Firearm sales broke records in the Obama era and exceeded that pre-pandemic record last year. While African American gun ownership has increased, the vast majority of folks hyperexercising their Second Amendment rights are white people who use the language of self-defense, safety, and protection as the excuse to stockpile guns.

One wonders if they are not readying themselves for a war. Dylann Roof told officers that he wanted to start a race war when he slaughtered nine worshipping souls in a South Carolina church. One wonders if his singular attack, together with the collective attempt at insurrection on January 6, 2021, is a dress rehearsal. It seems Black people are considered the enemy. Unrest and disease are in the air. And the aggressors, the neighborhood warmongers, have restyled themselves as the ones under attack, as the ones needing protection.

And so, as has happened after every major moment of racial upheaval, African Americans have forged a politics of Black self-defense. Although the country loves to tout the nonviolent direct action of the King years, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, founded in Jonesboro, Louisiana, a small town about 20 minutes from where I grew up, rejected nonviolence as praxis. These World War II veterans carried guns and defended their homes and communities. So too did the Black Power eras most iconic group call itself the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. In Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2020, when a group of activists gathered to peacefully protest a persisting Confederate monument in town, they were intimidated by an armed biker militia group; in response, members of an area Black gun club showed up to protect the peaceful demonstrators. These local skirmishes, often in places with long and storied Confederate histories, are becoming increasingly volatile theaters in an increasingly tactical era of the U.S. gun-culture wars.

In the broader movement, however, the language has shifted from self-defense to public safety and protection, perhaps because this language is, in a word, safer. When the Black Panther Party defended its right to armed self-defense, the U.S. government responded by characterizing the group as a threat to democracy; killing its leaders, such as Fred Hampton; and imprisoning many of its members under dubious pretenses. Committed to learning the lessons of the 1960s and 70s, Black Lives Matter has chosen less muscular taglines.

But as that movement has matured, it has tried to learn the lessons of the Black Power era, pointing a watchful, anxious, dwindling white majority to the goals, rather than the tactics that have led to such fierce protests in the streets. The goal is safety; one tactic is self-defense. The goal is demonstrating that Black lives have value; the tactic is protest.

There is an earnestness to Black Lives Matter. A kind of barefaced removing of the gloves and the pugilism. Perhaps this is an homage to Trayvon Martin, who in his last moments was meandering through his fathers girlfriends neighborhood, chatting on the phone with his friend Rachel, unconcerned, as all young people should have the freedom to be, with the monster lurking in the bushes.

To this earnestness, the aggressors, who still are almost always white, have responded with cynicism, obfuscation, and gun sales. George Zimmerman added to the chorus by successfully auctioning for $250,000 the gun he had used to kill Martin.

What, then, does public safety actually look like if youre Black? To have that conversation means we are ready to think about the inherent unsafety and aggression of whiteness, about how those who are invested in the worst iterations of white identity politics frequently create the social conditions against which Black life needs defending. It is Roof being received warmly in a Charleston church while murder plots and plans teemed in his heart. It is Kyle Rittenhouse auditioning for a gunfight and then crying when the world obliged him.

Wells understood that the law would not protect Black life. For her, guns in every Black home were the ticket to respect. I remain ambivalent, vacillating between following the legacy of my grandmother, who always kept both a rifle and a pistol at the ready, and leaning into my own intimate knowledge of the devastation guns bring, as the daughter of parents who were both victims of gun violence, my father fatally so. I dont know that I believe guns are the guarantor of respect for Black life, given how much Black life they have taken. Im fairly sure the only places more guns can lead us to are war, death, and destruction. At the same time, Im a committed member of the Dont start none, wont be none and Dont pull the thang out unless you plan to bang generation.

What continues to elude us, despite recent rejections of white vigilantism and excessive police force, is respect for Afro-American life. Over the past ten years, social-justice movements have used the streets, the courts, the voting booth, and the bully pulpit to mount a full-scale defense of Black life. But until we are able to tell the cold, hard truth about the existential threat of white racial aggression, not only to people of color but to the country as a whole, speaking of self-defense will be mere obfuscation. And the tools, the weapons, of self-defense will remain the province of those who picked the fights in the first place.

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Standing Your Ground While Black - The Cut

A march in 2020. Photo: Joshua Rashaad McFadden

Andrew Smith had his arms in the air when NYPD officer Michael Sher forcibly snatched down his face mask and fired pepper spray into his eyes. Smith and hundreds of others had gathered at the corner of Bedford and Tilden Avenues in Flatbush to peacefully protest police violence and racial injustice, as millions across the country were doing in the days after George Floyds murder. I made sure my hands [were] exaggeratedly almost in a YMCA stance, Smith told the Daily News, to make clear that Im not here to make an issue. His compliance didnt matter. White people protesting alongside Smith also had their hands up, but Sher singled out the 31-year-old Black Brooklyn resident. I ripped the shit off, and I used it, Sher boasted of the incident minutes later, an admission captured by the officers own body-camera footage.

Smith was one of the NYPDs numerous victims during the Black Lives Matter protests. Officers plowed a police SUV into a crowd of demonstrators in Prospect Heights part of the wave of at least 104 car rammings, according to terrorism researcher Ari Weil, a number of them committed by white supremacists and law enforcement that summer. Police punched peaceful protesters in the face, body-slammed them to the ground, struck them with clubs, broke their fingers, beat them from car tops, and pointed guns in their direction. Journalists, legal observers, and medical volunteers were not spared the flagrant brutality and abuse. Protesters chanted, We are peaceful! What the fuck are you? in response to the violence.

In many ways, the historic demonstrations of 2020 resembled the nonviolent civil-rights marches of the first half of the 1960s, yet authorities responded to the protests violently. The police today are just as brutal as they were in the 1960s but are jacked up after decades of militarization.

New York City in summer 2020 looked much as it had in July 1964, when Harlem and Bed-Stuy erupted for six nights after a 15-year-old high-school student named James Powell was fatally shot by an NYPD lieutenant. Police beat demonstrators with their fists and their clubs, shot their firearms in the air, and detonated tear-gas grenades. Residents, in turn, taunted police, threw Molotov cocktails at them, hurled bricks and bottles from rooftops, looted stores, and set buildings ablaze.

A protest in Harlem in July 1964. Photo: AP PHOTO/AP

National authorities responded to the rebellion in Harlem in 1964, and to the thousands that followed across the U.S. through the early 1970s, by declaring a War on Crime and supporting an unprecedented investment in local law enforcement. By the end of the decade, police departments from New York to Los Angeles had veritable arsenals at their disposal: firearms such as AR-15s and M4 carbines, steel helmets, three-foot batons, gas masks, tanks, helicopters, and a host of chemical weapons. Much of this equipment had been used by the U.S. military in Vietnam and Latin America, like, in our own time, the mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles driven first in Iraq and then in New York.

Although repressive measures against protesters have escalated in recent years amid ongoing police militarization, protesters themselves have grown more peaceful. According to the Washington Post, at the height of the civil-rights movement, between 1960 and 1968, roughly 11 percent of protests whether nonviolent direct action or full-scale rebellion involved property damage. By contrast, only 4 percent of the thousands of nationwide demonstrations in the summer of 2020 involved property damage. Police too suffered less harm than their counterparts in the earlier period: 2 percent of cops reported injuries during the 2020 protests as opposed to 6 percent through the civil-rights era.

Contrary to the fearmongering rhetoric of conservative politicians and media outlets, Black Lives Matter has advanced the direct-action tactics of the civil-rights movement. We were out for a peaceful march, 22-year-old Devin Khan told The City. Khan was injured by the NYPD SUV and was later struck with a police baton on his shoulder and abdomen while demonstrating on the Manhattan Bridge. I saw old people, mothers with children, people in wheelchairs, Asian, white, Black all kinds of people who are just tired and angry with whats happening. Smith, Khan, and tens of millions of other protesters across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., were exercising their First Amendment rights to challenge the decision to invest in police forces, surveillance technologies, and prison systems over schools, jobs, and decent shelter for poor people. Were not domestic terrorists, said Khan.

When the police arrived at otherwise nonviolent demonstrations ready to do battle, sporting helmets and protective armor that made them look like RoboCop, they set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy. The instances in New York and other cities when people threw water bottles and other objects at officers, set police cruisers on fire, and caused property damage often occurred after police had aggressively patrolled peaceful marches and vigils. The lesson here is that antagonistic policing tends to incite violence, especially when people are protesting the very thing they are then subjected to.

The cycle of police violence, protests against that violence, and an ever more aggressive police response will continue until the underlying socioeconomic drivers of inequality that extend far beyond a single law-enforcement agency are addressed. Yes, theres the danger of COVID, but even if that goes away, weve got these other viruses racism, white supremacy, police brutality, said 24-year-old Hazkel Brown, who suffered nerve damage to his right arm after an NYPD officer hit him with a baton during a peaceful demonstration, to The City. Those viruses arent going anywhere unless people are willing to do something.

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The Return of the Mass Protest - The Cut

The Wendys where Rayshard Brooks was killed, on June 13, 2020. Photo: Joshua Rashaad McFadden/The New York Times/REDUX

Two weeks after uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd left Atlanta littered with ashes, protesters flooded the citys streets once more. The police had killed again, and this time the victim was an Atlantan: 27-year-old father and music lover Rayshard Brooks, shot in the back twice by Atlanta police officer Garrett Rolfe. The Wendys where Rolfe killed Brooks the day before went up in flames, lighting up the night as protesters chanted and mourned, decrying a system that disproportionately takes the lives of Black people as a matter of course.

You are disgracing our city, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms had declared when the protests broke out two weeks earlier. Bottomss admonishment was celebrated by pundits and politicians, winning her a national profile. If you care about this city, then go home, she urged.

But protesters filled the streets precisely because they cared so deeply. Six years after the first round of Black Lives Matter uprisings, it felt to many that the system had not fundamentally shifted. The 2020 protests popularized the demand to defund the police and invest instead in community-based safety and well-being a demand that many organizers in Atlanta had been working to make reality for the previous two decades.

Despite those efforts, the citys leadership responded to the 2020 uprisings with a mix of co-option, half-measures, and brutal police repression a pattern the city has long practiced. Indeed, the reaction to Rayshard Brookss killing was in some ways predictable the result of decades of sweeping police violence under the rug and disregarding organizers demands.

In 2006, 92-year-old grandmother Kathryn Johnston was murdered by Atlanta Police Department officers in her home after officers entered under a no knock warrant, the same type of warrant police had when they killed Breonna Taylor 14 years later. In response, civil-rights leaders, including Joseph E. Lowery, a onetime confidant of Martin Luther King Jr., led the charge to revive civilian oversight of police, in the hopes of exposing the pervasive violence that the department had historically kept quiet. At the same time, community members gathered at a local church to demand consequences for the officers and broader reforms.

Following the outcry, the city established the Atlanta Citizen Review Board in 2007. Many hoped this would begin a process of accountability, but two years later, the ACRB still had little authority to address police misconduct. It could not, for instance, force officers to testify or otherwise cooperate with investigations. City leadership had purported to concede a demand but refused to cede any power.

By the time Johnstons killers were convicted, the high-profile murder of a local bartender had fueled a narrative of rising crime and calls to increase policing. In response, a group of public defenders, local organizers, service providers, and those living in police-saturated neighborhoods formed Building Locally to Organize for Community Safety. (Tiffany Roberts, who co-wrote this story, is a co-founder.) BLOCS advocates knew that the criminal convictions of officers would not change the devastation that tough-on-crime tactics continued to have on their communities, and they began working for more substantive accountability.

In 2010, BLOCS won more power for the ACRB, and the next year, the organization pushed the city to dismantle the APDs paramilitary Red Dog Unit, the source of frequent complaints of excessive force. The year before, the unit had raided the Atlanta Eagle, a gay bar in midtown Atlanta, and assaulted patrons. Red Dog had also been accused of performing unconstitutional public strip searches of predominantly Black men. Community members cheered at the news of Red Dogs dissolution, but the city quickly replaced the unit with APEX a brand-new militarized APD squad that would come to perform many of the same functions as its predecessor, conducting raids in what it called high crime areas.

In 2014, when Officer Darren Wilson murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson Atlanta protested with the rest of the nation. A year later, Atlantas official Black Lives Matter chapter was founded. By the time hundreds of protesters blocked an Atlanta interstate in 2016 leading then-Mayor Reed to ahistorically opine that Dr. King would never take a freeway the citys response to demonstrations and policy advocacy had become increasingly hostile, with officials eagerly deploying law enforcement to combat the growing movement.

Despite opposition, organizers notched crucial wins, including the creation of what is now called the Policing Alternatives & Diversion Initiative, which would reduce police contact with those criminalized for poverty; significant reforms to the citys cash-bail system; the (still unfulfilled) promise to close the city jail; and the dissolution of federal contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

At the same time, police murders in Atlanta continued apace, taking the lives of Alexia Christian in 2015, Deravis Caine Rogers in 2016, Deaundre Phillips in 2017, and organizer Oscar Cain Jr. in 2019. And efforts by regressive councilmembers, municipal judges, and APD allies to roll back key reforms began almost as soon as they were passed.

In 2020, the citys response to the uprisings was marked by brutal police repression, even as the governor of Georgia deployed the National Guard. Police were deployed to quash protests, often trapping protesters in Atlantas famous Centennial Olympic Park before shipping them off to the closest jail. Using tear gas, rubber bullets, and sheer force, police injured and arrested protesters throughout the summer. During just two weeks of demonstrations, police arrested roughly 600 people, cycling hundreds through already overcrowded jails in the middle of a deadly pandemic.

The Bottoms administrations response to Brookss death a mix of superficial proposals and police repression was more evidence that the old ways were not working. After convening an advisory council to issue emergency recommendations on use-of-force policies for the Atlanta police, the mayor cherry-picked just under half of the suggestions, generally electing to investigate or study rather than substantively address the issues that led to Brookss death. Even as the call to defund the police reached the mainstream, Bottomss administration insisted instead on the need for additional training and protocols. But as protesters in the streets made clear, these reforms as envisioned and practiced by the city had failed to stem the violence.

Rolfe, Brookss killer, was himself evidence of tepid reforms inability to resolve the crisis. Indeed, on paper, he is the ideal modern, reformed officer. He had reportedly undergone 2,000 hours of training, including sessions on de-escalation tactics, cultural-awareness training, and instruction on use of deadly force. None of this preparation stopped him from killing Rayshard Brooks.

Most recently, in 2021, Mayor Bottomss administration worked closely with the Atlanta Police Foundation one of policings fiercest defenders in Atlanta to create plans for a police training facility, named Cop City by organizers who rose up to fight it. If built, Cop City would require the partial destruction of critical green space in Atlanta and far outstrip the training facilities of the much larger L.A. and New York police departments. As one of Bottomss last major projects before leaving office, Cop City would expand the footprint of policing in Atlanta just one year after mass protests calling to defund the police.

Even still, hope remains. Organizers continue to build support for alternatives to policing, pick up electoral wins, practice mutual aid, and form creative coalitions to meet the moment, while ongoing protests send a clear message: As long as political leadership relies on policing to resist, sidestep, and quash demands for transformation, police will continue to kill, and cities will continue to burn.

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The Failure of Police Reform - New York Magazine

President Obama in 2009. Photo: Pete Souza/The White House

I was 17 when President-elect Obama walked across the stage in Grant Park with his Black, beautiful, accomplished wife and their two young Black daughters to give his acceptance speech. Its a hazy memory. The morning after, still groggy, I wondered if I drifted during coverage and dreamt it. Coming out of her bedroom, slow and curious like a shadow, my mother stood beside me, mouth agape at the television screen. I cant believe it, she whispered, as if not to awaken some alternate reality. It was what one might imagine a fantastical, spectacular culmination of thousands of years of struggle to feel like. It was satisfying, the spite of it all: this Black man, on this stage, with his Black family, knowing there were witnesses who doubted his legitimacy or, worse, would rather see him dead than occupy the White House. Id never felt that high of representation mirroring me.

President Obama was president for eight years. Im 30 now and staring down the greatest threat to African American voting rights in generations. A climate crisis threatens the livelihoods of the Black and poor, of the Black and coastal, of the Black and immigrant. We face a wealth gap that has only worsened in the last decade, leaving Black communities even more vulnerable to the failures of late-stage capitalism than they already were before the First Black Presidency. As the killings of Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray, the loop of uprisings that followed, and the anti-capitalist, socialist movement of Occupy Wall Street shaped our perspectives, young people of the Black Lives Matter generation learned quickly, and with much devastation, that representation had a hole in it where our ideas of justice rooted in policy dematerialized. We had set the bar too high. We expected our first Black president to decry the actions of the racist police, to call off the dogs and stand unequivocally with protesters to somehow inherit Martin Luther King Jr.s project of disarming white supremacy and see it through to a different end. He didnt. He hedged and stood tall in two-sides-ism, calling angry civilians thugs and their uprising a counterproductive distraction to the more peaceful protesters doing things the right way. What we expected of the Obama administration was beyond what the framework of the presidency allowed. That was a heartbreaking realization. Some of us came to it sooner than others.

Police departments and some communities have to do some soul-searching, Obama said in an address to the nation the afternoon after Baltimore burned following Grays funeral. But I think we as a country have to do some soul-searching.

Try as we might, no generation can escape the solipsism of disappointment. I blush some at the reality that there are plenty who came before us, those elders and mentors and teachers who organized in labor movements of the 70s and 80s, radical Black feminists of the Combahee River Collective who studied socialist theory, and antiwar movements of the 60s. They were plenty skeptical. And said as much. In the practice of our politics, the Combahee River Collective Statement drafted in 1977 says, we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving correct political goals. It feels like a warning. Learning from the scholarship of the organizers who came before us mightve cost us less suffering.

In essence, President Obama did exactly what he was supposed to do, what every white man in this position before him had done prove to America that he was president for all, subject of and beholden to loyalty to country. For some Black Americans, the talented-tenth generation, older and more keen on respectability, this was evidence of progress, proof positive that hed fulfilled the ultimate goal of assimilation permission to be free from the obligations and limitations of race. For my fellowship, the generation of Occupy Wall Street and Trayvon Martin, such wish-fulfillment was a loss. When Obama was on the campaign trail for president, there was still a part of him that was ours: He was supposed to be the Organizer from Chicago. Wed heard that he had cut his teeth on the stones of our history. But the day he crossed that stage as president-elect, he became the figurehead of the elite, of the ruling class, a symbol of its evolution toward a new racial permeability the kind that exists to create a new, racially integrated class of leaders only meant to continue the project of neoliberalism and its genesis, white supremacy.

What my generation started to learn about power the day of Obamas Baltimore remarks was that the power of the people might never translate to the presidency. That emulating the power structures that govern us could only get us so far. Most critically, we started to learn that, regardless of how successful representation might appear, representation alone isnt The Work. One too many Cousin Pookie references on top of President Obamas suggestion that Black poor mothers feed their children cold Popeyes for breakfast, and weve seen representations ugliness made plain.

Already, were seeing reticence and a growing collective side-eye reflected in recent elections, where Black candidates and electeds struggled to ignite the Democrats most reliable base through the fog and fatigue of a post-Obama, post-Trump world. In New York City, where new mayor Eric Adams has already begun to reinstate archaic, racist policing strategies like the controversial Anti-Gun Police Unit to go with his general cop rhetoric, or in San Francisco, where nearly a decade ago, the states top cop would refuse to investigate and prosecute a series of killings by police, yet go on to become the current vice-president of the United States, theres an asterisk next to the value of political representation, a gnawing feeling that it may have been a bad gamble. Perhaps weve opened the proverbial door so wide that it smacks us in the ass. Weve sat on Americas throne, history has been made in name but in Georgia, Stacey Abrams gears up to run a race she should never have lost in the first place as franchisement for Black voters is rolled back little by little each decade. Weve earned our skepticism.

Representation has, in many ways, gotten us closer to the truth about how our politics actually work. And its taught us everything we need to know about power: that its a limited resource. That figureheads of democracy are just figureheads unless the tools of democracy belong equally to the people furthest from the power structure. It taught us that while the ruling class has racial permeability, our ability to move through the corridors of power doesnt inherently constitute an ability to change the structural functions of power to empower. And it taught us that no matter who owns the keys to the White House, the power and persuasion of the executive branch will likely bend toward it. So, like any scarred romantic, young Black voters are more guarded of our vote, less tolerant of the two-page pamphlet on jobs and crime that many candidates have gotten away with calling race-conscious policy. Its forced everyone to get more specific about what it really looks like to leverage the power of the federal government to protect and advance the rights and liberties of Black people.

When we hit the streets after the killings of Trayvon and Freddie Gray, we were demanding that Black children be free from racist policing a general, while powerful, demand. Ten years later, after countless broken promises, reckoning only with police violence is a cop-out; were continuing the legacy of Occupy Wall Street, of Black feminist organizers, and are instead building coalitions focused on ending the police state. The priority shift should hardly feel surprising. Some of the same organizers and voters who marched at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, and sat in the cold during Occupy as teenagers, are now adults. Theyre also community organizers and national leaders done with rising through ancient ranks of control to build power. For them, reform isnt enough. Neither are the old tactics of slow and steady restructuring or the persuasion of relatability and charm.

When we say we want leaders who represent us, we mean leaders who represent us on the issues, who represent those bound to these systems of power. Any candidate who wants the vote of the people who have time and time again been let down by a nation that has promised so much and delivered so little will have to speak the language of progress meaningfully to win meaningful results.

But I cant, in good faith, say that representation politics have given us nothing. I loved the dream of the First Black President, and cherished the idea of President Obama. I can admit that I was still moved by the poetics of what representation could mean, by the endless metaphors it offered up about Blackness survivability and resistance. But what I discovered is that representation is, fundamentally, a metaphor. And a metaphor is made up of two parts, what Jericho Brown calls, the tenor and the vehicle. The vehicle of the metaphor, in its most literal sense, brings you closer to the thing you want to know more about, moves you closer to meaning. We say, There is power in representation, because power is the thing we want to know more about. And when we talk about representation in our politics, what were trying to understand is how power works and then how to emulate it. This is representations true utility: it tells us what we need to know about power so that we can get around it. Its not the nail; its the hammer.

Perhaps President Obama, his quixotic nature soon replaced by the gray hairs and hard truths of his first term, felt himself trapped by representation. Trapped by the surveillance and vitriol associated with representation, by the weight and responsibility of being the first. Maybe he wanted to act up! Perhaps he dreamed of being the kind of president who could achieve universal health care, cut incarceration rates, and erase the myth of Black inferiority. And perhaps some of the grays can be attributed to late nights wondering whether Black people might understand just how much self-sacrifice went into doing that job with his head down all so that some snotty-nosed, morally superior kid who grew up seeing his face on the news could come along and feel self-affirmed enough to critique him. It would be an awkwardly fair irony.

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The Fallacy of Representation - The Cut

September 1, 2016, in San Diego, California: Eric Reid (No. 35) and Colin Kaepernick (No. 7) of the San Francisco 49ers kneel on the sideline during national anthem, as free agent Nate Boyer stands, before the game with the San Diego Chargers at Qualcomm Stadium. Photo: Michael Zagaris/San Francisco 49ers/Getty Images

Unless you know what to look for, its not clear why the photo is notable, let alone historic. It shows a football field, Levis Stadium in Santa Clara, California, before the start of a game. The teams are on their respective sidelines. Nothing is happening. The playing surface is still smooth, and if anything stands out, its the 50-yard-line logo: SF, for San Francisco. If you arent looking closely for the player wearing No. 7, the only one sitting down, youll probably miss him.

But hes there, a red speck near the bottom of the frame. Colin Kaepernicks protest would soon upend the world of professional sports, though nine months earlier, his body had betrayed him. He had lost his starting-quarterback gig to a younger player and suffered a season-ending labrum tear in his shoulder that required surgery. He was 29 years old and three years removed from his Super Bowl appearance, and success had eluded him since then. Criticisms he had faced since becoming a starter that he was physically impressive but cognitively limited, uneasy in the pocket and unable to read defenses had fueled the broad impression that he was little more than a body.

So by August 2016, when a reporter named Jennifer Lee Chan photographed Kaepernicks first documented refusal to stand during the national anthem, igniting a controversy that led to his vilification by the Trumpist right and his blackballing by the leagues owners, the ailing quarterback wasnt just out for justice. He was seeking control.

A paradox of professional athletics is how mastery over ones body facilitates its surrender. Few jobs call for such exhaustive submission to the dominion of other people. Players spend years fine-tuning muscles most people dont even know exist, breaking them down and rebuilding them to perform astonishing feats under duress, only to realize that autonomy is an illusion. Team executives use athletes as assets to trade and discard as it suits them, while spectators project and process their neuroses through the players.

Kaepernicks battle raged on two fronts. A maelstrom of circumstances gave the Black Lives Matter movement its unique contours, and one of the more striking aspects was the involvement of high-profile athletes, many of whom were negotiating professional reckonings at the same time. This was not a coincidence. When LeBron James led his Miami Heat teammates in their silent protest after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, he was less than two years removed from his infamous Decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and join rivals Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in South Beach to form the NBAs first modern superteam an alliance of stars who would have, in years past, sought championships as leaders of their own franchises.

The next half-decade saw James smeared as a traitor and accused of ruining the sport. Since then, the formulation he pioneered has become the league norm, heralding a departure from the days when players settled for the hand fate dealt them when they were drafted. A new age had come, marked by greater self-determination over how and where their bodies were deployed.

Variations on this theme echoed across sports. In womens athletics, it often materialized in disputes over equal pay. The killing of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer in 2014 came months into an intensifying debate about WNBA players flying overseas for money. Brittney Griner, it was reported, earned 12 times more to play in a Chinese league during the WNBAs off-season than she received during her entire rookie campaign with the Phoenix Mercury. The resulting discontent rippled outward; after the killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in 2016, WNBA players wore BLACK LIVES MATTERemblazoned shirts to their pregame warm-ups and declined to talk to reporters about anything besides police violence, resulting in fines from the league.

The U.S. womens soccer team was fresh off their victory at the 2015 World Cup when Megan Rapinoe knelt during the national anthem in solidarity with Kaepernick. They were embroiled in their own push for equal pay, premised on the absurdity of earning less money than their flailing male counterparts. Tennis star Naomi Osaka has made her support for the Black Lives Matter movement an exception to her reluctance to speak in public. Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history, became an outspoken supporter of the movement as she openly assailed her professions sanctioning body, USA Gymnastics, for enabling the sexual abuse of its athletes by Dr. Larry Nassar.

For his part, Kaepernicks dilemmas werent limited to his injuries or deteriorating relationship with the 49ers. Revelations about the long-term effects of concussions among NFL players had recently turned litigious, forcing the league to admit, after years of lying and thousands of lawsuits from ex-players, that football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy were linked.

All of these conflicts dealt with a basic question how athletes might take greater control of the way their bodies are used that was coming into focus for the players long before the misuse and abuse of human bodies became a national fixation. And for many, these concerns would only get more entwined. When NBA players initiated a wildcat strike during the COVID-disrupted homestretch of the 2020 season, it was nominally about getting more league support for that summers protests. But the strike followed a series of physical attacks against their fellow players by the police. Thabo Sefolosha, then a forward for the Atlanta Hawks, had his fibula broken by cops outside a New York City nightclub in 2015. Milwaukee police officers assaulted thenBucks guard Sterling Brown in a Walgreens parking lot in 2018.

Historically, the challenge of such paradigm-shifting moments has been less about drawing attention to these outrageous injustices to energize the public than funneling that energy into lasting solutions. Just as the advantages of athlete involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement were self-evident its help in mainstreaming once-marginal ideas about racism and policing, for example so were its drawbacks. A celebrity milieu begets celebrity-driven problem-solving. The NBAs strike broke not after radical changes to how this country addresses public safety but after some players phoned Barack Obama, who advised them to establish a social-justice committee and keep playing. The banner result was the leagues making some of its arenas available as voter precincts in the 2020 election almost a cruel joke, in retrospect, given how ineffectual the subsequent Congress has been in passing police reforms.

Elsewhere, the athletes particular mix of concerns, social and professional, skewed queasily and predictably toward the latter. The glaring refusal of many NBA players to admit that the Chinese governments abuses of the countrys Uighur minority were, in fact, bad China is a huge revenue generator for the league often overwhelmed their cries for human rights in the U.S.

One thread stands out, though: the galvanizing potential of feeling precarious. The psychic bridge that links the worries of a teenager walking home in suburban St. Louis to those of a multimillionaire athlete in Santa Clara is clear once you recognize that both look in the mirror and see a body in peril. This is not to equate the two but to note their rare convergence over the past decade and to ask what its rareness says about the long-term durability of their shared response. Can precarity felt by rich and famous athletes sustain ten more years of their investment in this movement? The only certainty, for now, is that the police will give them plenty of opportunities to show us.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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Black Athletes and the Value of a Body - New York Magazine

This Black History Month, Apple is encouraging you to go for a walk with activist Ay Tometi, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter.

Tometi has recorded a new episode of audio experience "Time to Walk" on Apple Watch, which will be released on Fitness+ on Feb. 7.

For those unfamiliar with "Time to Walk," the series features episodes of influential people talking about their lives as you take your daily stroll around your local park. In Dec. 2021, Prince William lent his voice to an episode, reflecting on the importance of mental health. Previous speakers include Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, Shawn Mendes, Uzo Aduba, Naomi Campbell, Randall Park, Draymond Green, Camila Cabello, and Min Jin Lee. Episodes are usually around 25 to 40 minutes long.

During Tometi's episode, she reflects on the murder of Trayvon Martin and how it impacted her activism, and how changing her name made her think differently about life.

You can listen to Tometi's "Time to Walk" episode using wireless headphones through Apple Watch's Workout app with a Fitness+ subscription.

If you're more into running, then there's another offering that might interest you. Also on Feb. 7, "Time to Run" (the running version) will launch a new episode featuring Fitness+ trainer Cory Wharton-Malcolm, as he coaches runners through the city of Atlanta, Georgia, passing the Birth Home of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame.

Apple is launching a number of other features and products in time for Black History Month, including a special edition AppleWatch Black Unity Braided Solo Loop and matching Unity Lights watch face inspired by Afrofuturism.

The App Store will also be shining a light on apps that promote Black people's wellbeing and health. And Apple Maps will enable users to learn more about Black history and Black-owned businesses through curated Guides.

While these features are great, it would be remiss not to mention that Apple employees have requested a re-investigation into past complaints of racism at the company. In an open letter, Apple employees stated they had raised complaints of discrimination only to be met with inaction from company's HR team.

"Apple prides itself on its commitment to diversity, equity, and an environment where every person is able to do their best work; however, in practice, this is far from the case," reads the letter. "Our experiences with the People team in dealing with harassment and discrimination have left many of us more vulnerable."

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Apple takes us for a walk with Ay Tometi, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter - Mashable

The horse is making a name for himself!

The first Black family in Texas to race quarter horses has named their newest steed Black Lives Matter.

The Hatley Bros. Racing Stables is a family-owned establishment, created six decades ago by James Hatley Sr. His granddaughterKeeundra Hatley-Smith told Because of Them, We Can that he"was the first African American to race quarter horses in the state of Texas from the 60's to the early 90's."

Hissons KeElronn and James Hatley Jr. have now taken over for him, owning and operating the business. Recently, the family bought a new steed for their stable, giving the horse a unique name, Black Lives Matter. The Hatleys say they put a lot of thought into the name, hoping to use it as a way to consistently bring awareness to the condition of Black people in America and leave its mark on race attendees whether the horse wins or not.

We named him Black Lives Matter because we knew he was special and want to bring our culture to the sport, Hatley-Smithsaid.

KeElronn took to social media to share a video of the new horse being registered by officials.

So far, the horse has competed in a number of races, KeElronn and his family taking to social media to share the most recent one at Louisiana Downs. Black Lives Matter began in last place, quickly beating out the other horses to prove himself victorious, winning as the family cheered him on and celebrated.

The legacy of Black cowboys is currently experiencing a resurgence in popular culture with more spotlight being placed on those keeping the history alive across the country like the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, various films paying homage to legendary Black cowboys, and the work of photographers like Ivan McClellan intent on documenting the stories of Black cowboys.

Here are a few photos thatKeeundra shared with Because of Them, We Can that show her family's rich history in racing horses.

The naming of the Hatley horse helps keep the necessary conversations going, even if it is a bit overt in messaging. Currently Black Lives Matter is resting and gearing up for his next race, which is scheduled for April 2022.

Photos Courtesy of Keeundra Hatley-Smith

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First Black Family In Texas To Race Quarter Horses Names Newest Steed 'Black Lives Matter' - Because of Them We Can

Ramsey Orta was a friend of Eric Garners for five years. He watched as police officers Justin DAmico and Daniel Pantaleo stopped Garner and attempted to arrest him on July 17, 2014. He was recording as Pantaleo held Garner in a choke hold that was banned by the NYPD and as his friend uttered his final words: I cant breathe.

Orta has since had a series of run-ins with the judicial system, facing numerous arrests and serving prison time on drug and gun charges. Orta alleges that police have been trying to get revenge on him. In 2021, Orta published a book, A Shot in History: the Poisoned System.

Ramsey Orta filmed the killing of his friend Eric Garner outside a Staten Island beauty store at 3:30 p.m. on July 17, 2014.

Here, the same location at 3:30 p.m. on January 22, 2022.

Photographs by Joshua Rashaad McFadden

I had just gotten home from work, and from picking up my daughter, and was on my way to get something to eat when I ran into Eric at a KFC. I got my food and walked outside to where he was, and stopped to ask him for a pack of cigarettes. We started talking. In the midst of that conversation, a fight breaks out between two people. He jumps up and separates them and, as hes doing that, two police ride over and immediately jump out and go straight to Eric while the other two people walk off like nothing happened.

Eric asked Officer Justin DAmico, What happened? Why did you stop me? DAmico said he just saw him sell cigarettes. Then Eric just started screaming, saying he was crazy, he was lying, and telling him to get out of here.

Pantaleo just kept saying, We saw you selling cigarettes. There were games being played. Thats when I pulled my camera and started recording, because a week earlier, I actually recorded an incident on that same spot, where police beat somebody else up too.

Eventually Pantaleo grabbed Eric and started choking him, wrestling with him. Eric was standing his ground for a little while, trying to stand up. Hes a big guy. But he eventually got tired. When they finally fell on the floor, and he was trying to get Erics hands cuffed behind his back, Pantaleo didnt let him go. Im just standing there recording, watching, watching my surroundings. And then I see Eric stop breathing. His eyes just rolled back.

Eric was lying there for a good ten minutes. And the police officers were acting like he was alive, bullshitting for the crowd, talking to him like, Oh, Mr. Garner, come on. You got to get up. And Im standing there, screaming, Yall n- - - - - killed him. Yall know hes dead.

Paramedics ended up walking Eric to the ambulance. Its a crowd circling around us. As soon as they close his door, one of the officers tells another officer, Grab him, hes threatening me. Lock his ass up. The crowd heard it. And as soon as the cop grabbed one of my arms, the whole crowd grabbed the other arm and sucked me into the crowd, like, Yo, yall not doing nothing to him. He aint do nothing. He was sitting on his fucking bike the whole time, recording yall.

When they realized the crowd was not going to budge, they was like, All right. Well, then, go home.

I go to my house and get in the shower. The next thing I know, Ive got a thousand text messages and missed calls from everybody. One of my good friends at the time calls me and says, Bro, I got somebody down here thats offering $250 for pictures. I show the guy my video, and he asks, How much you want for it? Im like, I dont want nothing for this, man. This is Eric for me. Just put it up on the news.

He said, Do you wanna put your name on it? I say yeah. He says, Are you sure? You know, whats gonna happen to you, right? I didnt care. They already know who I am anyway.

The police targeting me started ASAP. That very same night they started with their bullshit, everything that transpired from the night they killed him up until I got sentenced. The first case came about when they finally figured out that I wasnt going to give them the original video. Childrens Affairs kept coming to my house. And I kept telling them, No. They went to my childs mothers job, asking her for the video. Shes telling them, No. She lost her job. Eventually, the night that they ruled it a homicide, it was a couple days after I ended up getting locked up for gun possession. It was never found on me. No fingerprints on the gun. Nothing. And then when I got sentenced and sent to prison, that was a whole other story.

Its never ending. Sometimes I dont even like doing these interviews because I get backlash. Every time I talk, they start to put pressure on me. I cant even pay attention to the Black Lives Matter movement, or with Erics situation, because Im personally dealing with a battle with the NYPD.

When I bailed out for the gun case, the drug case came about. They said I was selling drugs to an undercover, and that I was a kingpin of a drug organization. They had me, my moms, and my so-called brother and 20 other people. It was a big indictment, and they had me at the head. This time, locked up on Rikers Island, I find rat poison in my food. That felt pretty much targeted for me.

I ended up exposing that. That got me home. I raised enough money to bail out on the drug case, so now Im out on two bails. I leave Staten Island, and I go back to the Lower East Side, where Im from, and no less than a week later, they target me again, said that I sold drugs to an undercover in my neighborhood. I go to court and find out that the drugs were fake anyways, so they couldnt charge me. But then, they try to switch it up and said that I robbed her for the mark money. They tried to hit me with a robbery charge on police. Obviously, it was bullshit. Even the judge was like, How the fuck does he rob police? I bailed out on that case before they even dropped it completely.

I just hired a civil-rights lawyer because I got concrete proof of nonstop fucking harassment. I got voice recordings, I got text messages from parole, I got everything. They stopped me from leaving this state. I just got off parole, but Im still on federal bail. And its still hard to get out of this state, even though I just finished state parole.

But I dont want my story to discourage anyone from filming police. Just get legal representatives before you expose that video, because if it just so happens to become a situation that sparks a situation, you will become a situation. They cant lock us all up or set us all up when everybodys pulling out their cameras. Whether you like it or not, you have to have an opinion about it or you have to be doing something about it. Keep exposing them.

Feidin Santana witnessed Walter Scott get shot in the back by Officer Michael Slager in North Charleston, South Carolina, on April 4, 2015. The police officer had pulled Scott over for a faulty brake light. Scott then fled on foot, and Slager pursued him, shooting him first with a taser, then firing eight rounds at him with a gun.

Santana, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, was on his way to work at a barbershop when he saw the scene unfold and decided to record it. In the days leading up to the shooting, he had been preparing to move back to the DR.

Feidin Santana filmed the killing of Walter Scott, whom he didnt know, at 9:30 a.m. on April 4, 2015, in North Charleston, SC.

Here, the same location at 9:30 a.m. on January 14, 2022.

Photographs by Joshua Rashaad McFadden

I was running late to my job when I saw a chase between an officer and a man. They had a little bit of a struggle, and I saw Walter Scott screaming. I decided to pull my phone out and just record, to prevent some bad outcome from happening. To intimidate the officer with my camera, I got closer; that way, he could be aware that someone was there.

But it didnt happen the way that I thought it would. Walter Scott got up, and the officer deployed his weapon on him, shooting him eight times while he was running away.

Had I been in my right mind, I would not have stayed to stand behind a shooting. But I was really frozen; I never put down my phone. I never got on the ground afraid that I might get shot.

It was very difficult for me to process it. As an immigrant, I always believed that officers are living up to their values of protecting and serving citizens. It was really shocking to see the exact opposite.

I was very nervous. I spoke with several witnesses around the area about recording the video. As soon as they saw it, they all backed away from me, like, Listen, man, like you are in problems.

That was the dilemma. Morally I want to do the right thing, but at the same time I need to go back to my country, my roots, and my family. And I knew that if I gave up the video, I would be involved in the legal process.

So a few hours later, Im cutting hair in the shop and I see the story on the news. And they say there was a shooting with a Black man and an officer involved, and the victim died. But according to police, the officer acted in self-defense.

That was really the trigger. I had to forget about my personal dreams and stand up for justice. I understood that my only decision should be to give the video to Walter Scotts family so they can know the truth of what happened.

I received a lot of harassment for that. I received death threats, messages telling me that I shouldnt be involved in the case, that I should have stayed quiet. I just thought that everybody would understand that it doesnt matter if theyre Black, white, Hispanic, even police. I thought they would go against this guy for committing a homicide. But when I saw so many people defending the officer and, even in the trial, being denigrated by the defense attorney which I know is his job I was like, Wow, hes defending the indefensible.

This individualistic mentality is not going to take us anywhere; in order to change things, we have to work collectively. And we cannot be hiding against injustice. I think being silent on these issues is just as criminal as being the person who pulled the trigger. Thats why I decided to stand up and believe in this. And it didnt matter that my life was in danger. It didnt matter if I was going to face any retaliation. I understood that that was the right thing to do till this day.

Abdullah Muflahi is owner of the Triple S Food Mart in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There, on July 5, 2016, two police officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake tackled Alton Sterling to the ground and later shot him. The scene was captured by Muflahi on his cell phone and also on his stores security cameras.

The police took Muflahi into custody for several hours; he alleges they confiscated the surveillance video without a warrant. Muflahi has sued the City of Baton Rouge; officers Salamoni and Lake; two other officers, who later arrived on the scene; and the thenpolice chief for false imprisonment, illegal taking of his property, and the illegal seizure of his business establishment. The case is ongoing.

Abdullah Muflahi filmed the killing of Alton Sterling outside the Triple S Food Mart at 12:30 a.m., July 5, 2016, in Baton Rouge, LA.

Here, the same location at 12:30 a.m. on January 18, 2022.

Photographs by Joshua Rashaad McFadden

I had never seen a man get shot to death. It wasnt easy observing all that and taking it all in. It made me feel numb for a long time, and Im just finally getting out of it and kind of opening back up. It changed my life dramatically.

Right after I recorded the shooting, they locked me in the police car. It was hot, there was no AC coming to the back; I was in there for five or six hours I was afraid. I didnt know what was going to happen. It was very hard to all take in. I didnt do nothing. I was just there to witness it, there at the wrong time, wrong place. They didnt let me use the bathroom; they didnt let me have a bottle of water, even when I was in the hot car sweating. After that, they took me to a police station somewhere, and they locked me in a room for maybe another two hours. They treated me as if I was the bad guy. It was wrong. There was no professionalism at all. They just said that Iwas a witness and they needed me away from everybody. Finally, someone came to take my statement and drove me back to the store.

They told me that they had a search warrant to take the surveillance-camera system in the store, but I found out later that they had already unplugged and taken it hours beforehand. I didnt share the cell-phone video publicly until I went to my lawyer for advice. I was scared to do anything with it. But my heart wouldnt let me just stay quiet and let it go. I had to let it out. People needed to see the video. His family needed to see the truth.

Seeing other police shootings brings back a lot of flashbacks to the point where I cant sleep at night. But it just shows that the officers in this country need more training and more patience when theyre dealing with people on the street. They should learn how to de-escalate problems rather than escalate. I understand that its a very tough job. But this is what they chose to do, and they should do it correctly.

Diamond Reynolds was the girlfriend of Philando Castile when he was killed by police near Minneapolis on July 6, 2016. She and her 4-year-old daughter were in the car with him that night when they were pulled over ostensibly for having a broken taillight. (It was revealed later that the police thought Castile might resemble a robbery suspect.) Moments later, Officer Jeronimo Yanez shot and killed Castile as he reached for his wallet. Reynolds livestreamed the immediate aftermath on Facebook; the footage quickly went viral.

The Castile family eventually reached a $3 million settlement with the City of St. Anthony, Minnesota. Yanez was charged with second-degree manslaughter but ultimately acquitted. Afterward, Reynolds felt her community shunned her.

Diamond Reynolds filmed the aftermath of the killing of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, from the passenger seat of his car at 9 p.m. on July 6, 2016, in Falcon Heights, MN.

Here, the same location at 9 p.m. on January 16, 2022.

Photographs by Joshua Rashaad McFadden

We were leaving the grocery store, and Philando noticed we were being followed. We end up getting pulled over. The officer asked Phil, Do you know why youre being pulled over? Phil said he didnt know. I didnt know why either. The police officer asked for Philandos registration and license and he was a little nervous, so he told the officer, I have to look for it.

Philando was trying to ask him, Is it okay if I go and reach for my ID and my license and things that are in my pocket? But before I can reach, I have to tell you that I am concealed and licensed to carry. And before he can finish his statement, next thing you know, shots went into the car with me and my daughter, DaeAnna.

I couldnt believe it was happening. I was in disbelief. I thought he was still alive. I thought it was a dream. I thought it was a nightmare.

I whipped out my phone in the heat of the moment and started recording. Even though my phone only had like 5 percent battery life left, something took over my body, mind, soul that said, Record this, because if you dont, theres no telling where the story could end up, what they can make of this, what lies they can tell. And I didnt want to get blamed for Philandos murder.

That was when I decided to stream it to Facebook Live.

My daughter was 4 at the time. Philando was a father figure in her life and a very good role model to her. Seeing him get killed was such a shock. She now has nightmares and a hard time trusting authority. She still faces trauma every day. And shes in therapy, but therapy can only help her so much. I think seeing Phil not get any justice made her feel like the system failed us tremendously.

I have really bad anxiety and PTSD now. I dont drive my car at night because Im so fearful of what will happen to me and my daughter. Its been very hard to make relationships. After the shooting, the community separated themselves away from me. Me and my daughter began to get death threats. Philandos mother began stating that if her son was never with me, he would still be alive. Ive basically been blackballed. Anything that Minnesota has done on the behalf of Philando, I havent been invited to.

My daughter and I were both in that car. Why werent our lives taken more seriously? Why werent people checking to see if we were okay? What happens once all the cameras go away? What happens once its been years since loved ones have been deceased? What is the outcome? What is the change? What is different?

His mother, his family, probably felt like I was never good enough for him anyway. Im low-class. Im in poverty. Even though I worked a full-time and a part-time job at the time, and I have my own house, I was still struggling and I didnt have a lot of support with family. Philando was there for me every step of the way. I feel like his family hasnt supported me since his death because they never wanted me with him in the first place. To this day, Im like the most hated person in Minnesota. People are speculating that I received a million dollars in settlement. I never once received an increment of a million dollars. I have to pay all five of my lawyers. I have to pay restitution and fees. The amount that was posted in the media was not even close to what I received.

After that, in fact, I was still struggling. I was homeless. I went into a downward spiral; I was very depressed and didnt come out of my house for six months. No one would provide me moral support; everyone would basically solicit my story and make money off of it or use me.

My daughter has dreams and goals of traveling around the world, of telling her story to kids that have also been affected by not just gun violence but police brutality, on how to heal and overcome. About the challenges that shes faced from 4 to 10 years old. And the platform that we have is not for us here in Minnesota, because no one supports our movement.

On the anniversary of Philandos death, me and my daughter will go to the place over on Larpenteur where it actually happened, and well lay flowers down, because thats the only thing that we have. And even that little place, they made that into a peace garden. They have done so many things with that section of land where Philando was killed, and they have not once included me and DaeAnna. It doesnt even feel like the same place.

Sometimes I regret even being where I was at that point in time, because I recorded the immediate aftermath of him being killed. If none of that helped him after he was gone, then why did I do it? My videos were spot on. How is it that Darnella Fraziers videos were able to get justice for George Floyd but my video wasnt enough to get Philando Castile justice? And now I have to live with this for the rest of my life. Im living with the hurt in my heart and nightmares every night of seeing my beloved being killed in the seat next to me with blood all over his shirt. Im the one that can still smell the gunpowder. Im the one that has to constantly explain to my daughter that not all cops are bad, even though she doesnt believe me. Im the one that has to go above and beyond my call of duty to even let my story be heard, because no one feels Philando Castile got any justice at all.

Thanks, America.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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What Happened to the Witnesses - New York Magazine

Ashley Burch with Trayvon Martin. Photo: Courtesy of Burch

When Ashley Burch remembers her friend Trayvon Martin, she thinks of him walking around Carol City, the neighborhood north of Miami where they were teenagers together. They werent old enough to drive, so Trayvon walked nearly everywhere when he couldnt catch the bus, sometimes so far that he would call Ashley to come and pick him up. With what? she would ask. He would joke his Cadillac was in the shop the nickname he had for his bicycle.

That Trayvon liked walking was among her first thoughts a decade ago when Ashley heard how and where he had been killed. George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon, had told the police that he looked real suspicious in his dark-gray hoodie on the night of February 26, 2012, idly walking around the housing development where he was in fact staying with his father and his fathers fiance. To Ashley and the rest of his friends, that was just Trayvon. It was unthinkable that normal things about her friend were now being used to characterize him as some kind of menace. We knew Trayvon liked to walk, Burch, now 27, says from Jacksonville, Florida. And he always had a hoodie on. Of course he did it was raining that night.

Burch would spend the next few days, months, and years getting angry about those kinds of details, the ones that people on TV, in the news, and in public would get wrong or twist about Trayvon Martin, as his story ballooned from community tragedy into a national conversation on anti-Black racism. They used to say Trayvon was bigger than Zimmerman and he used to play football, and I was like, No, he played ball as a child. He wasnt even built like a football player. He was actually tall and really skinny. The Trayvon that Burch knew was relatively quiet with a goofy streak. He was often scheming planning an elaborate seafood party at a friends house with no budget or permission or teasing her about being a flagette in the school marching band. They would head to the Galaxy skate rink every Saturday to cruise around to hip-hop and R&B. Burch spoke to the press about Martin at a march the family held for their son a few weeks after his death. That was one of my best friends, somebody I talked to every day, he was very nice, she said. She was immediately flooded with Facebook messages from Zimmerman supporters, who told her that her best friend was a thug.

In 2013, Burch watched Zimmermans trial from home every day. When he was acquitted, and the movement around Trayvons murder grew bigger still, with protests taking place throughout the country, she found herself angry even with Trayvons supporters. A picture went around social media of a baby-faced Trayvon in an aviation uniform at space camp. He never went to space camp, Burch would hotly comment whenever she saw it. (The photo was actually from a seven-week aviation course Trayvon attended in 2009. He had been interested in a career as a pilot.) There was a girl at Carol City who would wear a Trayvon T-shirt for months, and it made Burch and her friend Aiyanna seethe. You dont even know him, they would whisper to each other.

After graduation, Burch left Carol City for Jacksonville, where she eventually attended Edward Waters University, an HBCU. She graduated with a criminal-justice degree, concentrating in forensic science. Now she is a probation officer. It sometimes surprises people that she works in law enforcement, if they know about her friendship with Trayvon. It makes me feel bad sometimes, you know? she says. Cause I know at the end of the day I have a job to do. As part of her position, Burch works with offenders to find drug-addiction treatment, employment, and housing. But for me to have to make the arrest I dont like that. Or when Im in court, seeing people getting sentenced to 25 years in prison. Her experience hasnt turned into political activism, however. When Black Lives Matter protests engulfed the country again in 2020, sparked by the murder of yet another unarmed Black man, Burch stayed home. She finds demonstrations overwhelming ever since attending one in Sanford held a month after Trayvons death. Everybody there had on a Trayvon shirt; he was on signs and everything. I think it was just too much too soon.

Burch rarely talks openly about Trayvon. She has tried to move on and into her adult life. But she has never changed the background of her Facebook profile: a now-infamous black-and-white photo of Trayvon in his hoodie, looking straight on, taken by his computer camera. I dont want anybody to forget about him, she says. Every year, she and friends text each other on his birthday. She wishes she could introduce him to her daughter, Skylar, now 3 years old, and imagines that he might have had his own children. He would have certainly had his own career, his own accomplishments to share. Burch says she is just now finally starting to discuss him in therapy. For this tenth anniversary of Trayvons death, she will likely head back to Miami to attend the annual peace march held by his family. It may be the first time that Burch actually visits Trayvons grave site, which she has avoided ever since his funeral. Ive been scared of how I will feel when I actually get there, Burch says. I miss everything about him. I miss his laugh. I miss talking to him all the time, just miss him being around. There are songs she cant listen to, like Tupacs Changes, where the chorus goes, Id love to go back to when we played as kids / But things change, and thats the way it is.

Burch has just a few low-quality photos of Trayvon saved from those days before everything was documented on social media, a sweet, mundane time capsule of their teenageness. One is a screenshot of the two of them chatting on ooVoo, a video-chat gamelike app they would play on forever when they werent texting or calling. Just a few hours before he headed out to a 7-Eleven on the highway for snacks, Ashley had called Trayvon, annoyed that he wasnt being responsive while they were messaging. He told her he was watching a movie and that he would call her back.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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Ashley Burch Remembers Her Friend Trayvon Martin - The Cut