Day 3

It’s become almost prescriptive, hasn’t it? The things we do when a Black person is brutally murdered. It’s as orchestrated as what we do when a storm rolls in through our city. Or when the power goes out. Or when we catch a cold. Call off from work. Buy chicken noodle soup. Make some tea. Lay in bed. Watch endless hours of television.

It has become like this, when a Black person dies. So common that we each have something like a checklist that we work through: the articles we read from the sites we trust, the people we call, the things that we say, the hashtags. Always with the hashtags.

I wrote about this recently, when I was going through my checklist because a cop had stuck his knee into George Floyd’s neck and murdered him. And the story was everywhere. The picture was everywhere: side by side with Colin Kaepernick taking a knee. They were going for irony, I think. So I became very aware of my checklist, the movements I have memorized, the things that I do. But mostly, I was wondering why. How that checklist got formed. And why my process looks the way that it does, whenever a Black man dies.

A Practice for Today:

What do you do when a Black man dies? Write about your checklist: not just what’s on it, but why it’s there in the first place, and who it is in service of. Think about where you learned that these are the things you should be doing. Think about your emotions, as you do these things, and all the ways your body might be feeling in those moments. Does it feel cathartic? Does it feel sincere? Does it feel heavy?

What do you want to do when a Black man dies? What do you wish you could do, instead of your current checklist? What stops you?

Is there something you can add to your checklist/something you can remove, that would make your practice more sustainable?