Threatening Vulnerable People Is No Way to Mourn Someone Who Was Murdered

Charlie Kirk’s suspected murderer was a 22-year-old white guy from Utah, but in the week since he was shot, at least six Historically Black Colleges and Universities have been forced to cancel classes due to bomb threats made against their students and faculty. Columnist Karen Attiah got fired from The Washington Post. Representative Ilhan Omar was nearly censured. Countless Black people have been harassed and, worse, countless immigrants have been threatened with the possibility of deportation, all for insufficiently respecting the life and death of a white supremacist. 

Charlie Kirk’s suspected murderer was, again, a 22-year-old white guy from Utah who, I’ll bet, does not own either of my books and has most likely never read a single word I have written over my nearly two decades of public life, but this is what my mentions on Elon Musk’s apartheid-curious platform have looked like for a week:

Not that we needed more evidence, but the past week has been Exhibit One that this country hates Black people, and will do everything it can to silence, harass, and even murder us. A white man killed another white man for reasons we still don’t know, with a gun I don’t think he should have had, but Black people are catching death threats. That doesn’t make sense, unless you understand how deeply racist this country is. Black people are being fired from jobs and harassed online for insufficiently venerating a white supremacist, and having the temerity to describe his beliefs in public. It’s as if we’re all being asked to say our name is “Toby” instead of Kunta Kinte while being informed that the beatings will continue until morale improves. The white-led government, and many white employers, white-owned sports leagues, white public intellectuals, and a non-zero number of Black assimilationists and assorted would-be overseers are largely playing along with this racist gaslighting, proving once again that Black people have few, if any, real allies.

Somebody who considers themselves a good-white-ally(™) is just about to type “not all white people” or “also Matt Dowd” or “look at what happened to Jimmy Kimmel” in response to this article. But what’s happening to white folks is that they’re being made to feel like Black people are made to feel every freaking day. Whenever white people catch a cold, Black people catch the flu, but God forbid I do a bit of triage before handing out chicken soup and Sprite to white folks feeling a bit under the weather these days.

The same thing is happening to the trans community, and the LGBTQ community more broadly, because when Kirk wasn’t railing against Black people, he was trying to stamp the LGBTQ community out of existence.

At this point, I’m supposed to turn and analyze what makes white males violently erupt against vulnerable people who have nothing to do with their problems. I’m supposed to talk about white gun culture and how it inevitably leads to racial and cultural violence. I’m supposed to talk about how Trump and his white supremacist government have given the very worst people in this country permission to carry out violence against any person they don’t like, with the promise of pardons should they undertake violence that pleases him. I know I’m supposed to address these topics, because these are the questions that have been floating around my professional networks for a week.

But even addressing those questions recenters the conversation around white folks and whiteness. It’s asking, “Now why did the monkey throw its poop at that fellow?” before you secure soap and a shower for the person covered in feces. At the moment, I’m just a little too beset by threats against myself and even my mother to think deeply about why white people do this. Analyzing why young white men are so dangerous to me is an intellectual luxury I do not have right now. I’m just trying to survive America for another week. 

Luckily, after a fashion, I have some experience with this. This is not the first round of death threats I’ve gotten, and, unless they successfully kill me this time, it won’t be the last. I’ve been a Black man in the public eye for a while now, and you don’t get to be an old public Black person without developing a few coping mechanisms to keep you going. For a lot of people currently under threat, this is their first rodeo. There are, for instance, a number of staffers at The Nation who are for the first time having to live with what I live with every day, since the vice president went after our publication. There are folks who were never on the kind of violent watch lists Kirk created who now find themselves on the wrong end of the online rope. 

It is terrifying to be in the eye of violent white folks. You have to take them seriously when they say they want you to come to harm. I cannot promise that you, or I, will survive what they’ll do next, but here are some tips to make it through this current phase of white America.
 

1. Stick Together

They cannot kill, fire, or silence all of us. The violent people are predators and if you look at every natural predator on this earth, their first move is always to separate their target from the herd.

People must resist the urge to say some people deserve to be harassed and menaced by the government and the online right, as if to distinguish the people who deserve death threats from those who are “doing it the right way.”

Silence in the face of white supremacy is complicity with white supremacy. If we all resolve to not stay silent, we become a truth-telling hydra. Every time the white wing gets one of us, there should be others ready to take our places.
 

2. Trying To Appease White Folks Is Useless

One consistent lie violent white people tell the rest of us is that they’re all like Reservoir Dogs’ Mr. Blonde, who famously says: “If they hadn’t done what I told them not to do, they’d still be alive.” They always want to act like their violence is in response to something, something specific that Black people could have just not done. But this is false. There is no good reason one Black person gets harassed, fired, or killed, while another does not. There is no intellectual consistency. There is no code. It’s luck. What white people are homicidally pissed off about today will be different from the reason they think you should die tomorrow. The randomness is what makes it so scary.

With that in mind, it is useless as a Black person to waste a lot of time trying to self-censor and fit yourself into whatever little box the white man has designed for you, because the parameters of the box will change, without warning, over the course of the next news cycle. They don’t want Black people to “engage with debate” or whatever focus-group-tested line seems reasonable to other whites. They want Black people to fail, suffer, and if necessary die. Since that’s not a choice you can credibly make, there’s no way to actually make them happy.

As my father, and many Black fathers, often said: “All I gotta do is stay Black and die.” It is, at the last, all we can do.
 

3. Don’t Buy A Gun

I’m a little bit of an outlier on this point. Many of my Black friends, including especially the ones in the public eye, are indeed armed and ready to defend themselves.

I am not. I do not think a gun is a defensive weapon. Every shred of evidence I’ve ever read tells me that owning a gun makes me or my loved ones more likely to suffer a gun death, not less. Don’t get me wrong; my home is as well secured as I can make it and I have blunt-force or stabbing weapons stashed in so many places in my house you’d think I was the Terminator-1,000. But if you just look at the numbers, gun ownership would not help me. 

And that’s while I’m inside the house. Outside, well, just look at what happened to Charlie Kirk. The man had a security detail, and was speaking to a friendly audience while literally surrounded by fans. But you can’t shoot the bullet you don’t see coming. 

We do not live in the Thunderdome. We are not participating in The Hunger Games. I am terrified of white people with guns right now, but my best chances of surviving them involves avoiding them, not trying to get into a shootout with them.

I do not want guns anywhere around me. Of course, I am on the left. Like most lefties, I do not think violence is the appropriate response to violence.

I’m not sure if any of this advice is helpful. I’m not a spiritual man, but if you told me that putting lamb’s blood on my door would make the white people pass over me and my loved ones, I’d probably try that too. The history of this country is replete with lynchings and draft riots and white people attacking Harlem or bombing Tulsa every time they get unreasonably angry with Black people who did them no harm. We are in one of those violent stages of history now, and none of us are safe from a white man with a gun.

But Black folks are survivors. LGBTQ folks are survivors. Immigrants are survivors. We’ve lived our whole lives around and among people who wish us harm, and we keep living anyway. Most of the media is and will remain relentlessly focused on white people, on their problems, and on their justifications for violence against us. But if you are suddenly on the receiving end of white wingers “doing politics the right way,” please know that you are not alone. Our fears and the threats against us may be erased from the white media narrative, but that doesn’t make them unfounded, illegitimate, or unimportant. We are going through this together, and we will survive it, together.

I hope to continue surviving with you.