We Eat Our Young

I’m not sure why we expected, or if we expected, justice for Karmelo in this nation that will not prosecute one of the perpetrators of pedophilia in the Epstein files. Since Sandy Hook and Uvalde, I have come to the distressing conclusion that those in power are the beneficiaries of how the systems they created function for the sole purpose of, eating our young.

We eat our young.

As a nation, we’ve eaten our young when so-called masters willingly sold their offspring, their black enslaved children off to places unknown, away from the only family they had ever known, for profit. We have eaten our young through genocide and open warfare against the native peoples of this land. We eat our young when people had to die to fight for labor rights so that children would not be eaten up by the machines of industry. We have eaten our young in this land from the very beginning. And it has a particular impact on the Black community.

Because what I feel like I’m witnessing is there’s usually a response in threes from the status quo of this country, that there are three sacrifices.

So Karmelo Anthony is the second sacrifice.

The first sacrifice of this triumvirate is the killer of Cyrus Carmack-Belton, who was Chikei Rick Chow, found not guilty after killing a boy over his insistence that the boy had stolen water.

I prayed that there wouldn’t be a third in the coming days.

This is where we in the Black community have come to expect that. But the lessons of how this country eats our young are meant to keep us in fear of raising a generation of children that are finally free.

I remember when I was teaching at CalArts, and this was maybe after Trayvon Martin, or maybe it was Mike Brown, or any number of the Black people who were murdered by the state in the early 2000’s. And I held some time in my classroom so that we could just sit in silence for a little while, or have an opportunity to unpack some of our feelings. And one young woman, a young Black woman, said to me that her mother, a Black woman, had told her that racism was over. And then she asked me why her mother would say that to her.

And I said, “it’s likely because she hoped that by now, it would be.”

Generations and generations and generations and generations of Black people have fought for the right to live free and unharmed in this clearly racist, violent society that we call the United States of America.

I don’t know why we’re surprised. Maybe it’s because of our humanity. Our humanity, which has always been much greater than theirs.

* * *

And I work in an industry that only acknowledges this type of thing when it’s forced to.

When I first got bit by the theater bug, I believed with my whole heart that the beauty of this craft was that through making believe and telling stories, you could help people get to a greater understanding about how to be more humane. Even as a young theater artist, what was the most exciting to me was using my body and my imagination to help other people understand how they could expand their empathy. Period.

And yet, after four decades in this industry, nothing has changed. I don’t know why it bothers me so much as a theater maker to know that this industry would like to opt out of standing behind storytellers, the storytellers who would help expose the parts of our humanity that lead to the destruction of a young Black man in the middle of his prime, who is being persecuted in a system that is doing what it was created to do, which was eat him, young.

* * *

I said previously that this thing comes in threes. I wrote that 2 days ago and then yesterday, two women were in the parking lot in a car with a baby, and they had just picked up some diapers. And the baby wound up being murdered by the police.

Over diapers.

Apparently, the store called the police saying that the two women had shoplifted. And rather than going through the process of investigating whether or not diapers had been shoplifted, the police chose to shoot into the car, killing a one-year-old baby. His name was Kohen Kartier Wiley. He was a baby who died by state sanctioned violence.

And there are really no words for what it means to be living in this Black female body, And knowing that my child will never be given the benefit of the doubt, that the only thing that I can guarantee is that our presence in spaces is considered to be suspect, and therefore Im supposed to teach my young child that its normal to be met with violence simply because of the body she was born into. Fck that! And I mean that with every fiber of my being. Being Black is not a liability dammit!

How the fck do we metabolize that a one-year-old baby is dead because somebody informed the police that their caregiver may have stolen diapers for them. How the hell do we deal with the fact that police drew their guns against two women and a baby over DIAPERS!

There are no words.