July 7, 2016

The night of July 7, 2016, I sat in my bedroom feeling excited and slightly nervous about the fact that I would be heading off for my freshman college orientation in just a few hours. My excitement quickly turned into heartbreak and fear, however, when I scrolled through my social media feeds and saw that five police officers had been shot and killed during an originally peaceful protest in Dallas, just four hours from where I lived. The shootings were allegedly conducted in retaliation for the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two Black men who were both shot by police officers just a few days earlier. This event struck deep because I had felt personally affected already by the murders of both men.

As I sat in my room, I began to cry, reading how people were using this unfortunate event to justify the deaths of these two Black men who had done nothing to warrant a death sentence. I began to think about the people I felt the closest to in my life, most of them Black. I worried about my cousins and my friends and my boyfriend at the time. I even worried about my three nephews, none of them older than eleven years.

I worried about how many cops would look at my nephews and see three Black boys, much like Tamir Rice, the twelve year old who had been killed by another officer for playing with a BB gun. They would see Black boys who would become Black men like Sterling or Castile, whom two officers had felt intimidated by enough to shoot to death. Black boys who would become Black men like the ones they arrested on a regular basis. They would see Black boys instead of little boys who were created by God with the very skin that they were in.

And then I began to worry about my father; my white father who I usually never felt I had to worry about in situations like these. I thought about him driving a Metro bus downtown surrounded by people who had received the same news as the rest of the country. People who had personally felt the sting of it in the same way I had. People who most likely had experienced injustice and oppression at the hands of white people at some point in their lives. I thought about how they might look at my father and see a white man, much like the officers who shot Sterling and Castile. A white man instead of a man who worried about his Black children and grandchildren in the same way that they worried about theirs. Or maybe the blue uniform he wore everyday would be enough to trigger the pain and anger that so many were feeling. The pain and anger that I felt.

I cried that night and didn’t hold back. At least there, in my bedroom, I didn’t have to try to justify my feelings to anyone. I didn’t have to explain why it was so emotional to me or try to argue why those two men didn’t deserve to die and why those cops didn’t deserve to die. In my bedroom, I didn’t have to feel ashamed for being scared for my family and my country. I didn’t have to explain why Black lives mattered or why I still refused to say blue lives mattered despite not supporting the killing of those officers. I didn’t have to explain the difference between a person who has no control over their race and a person who willingly takes an oath to put on a uniform and who can easily take it off, unlike their skin. I didn’t have to explain to people how I could still mourn the deaths of young innocent Black men even in the wake of the unjust deaths of police officers. So I cried unapologetically and took advantage of the fact that, at least for a few hours, I could feel all that I was feeling without being made to believe that I was wrong for it.

That was July 7, 2016, the day something sparked inside of me and the way I looked at the world changed forever.