It's difficult to add dialogue to the subject of Black lives. The rhetoric is already so expansive, it's challenging to find where one opinion ends and another begins. Like others, I struggled to focus last week in the midst of a week filled with more needlessly dead Black men and a city, Dallas, broken by the execution of officers. Last week was difficult; life is a sacred and it was taken from to many unjustly, and tragically.
I've lived in a majority Black city for a while now, and each time a police officer kills a person of color in some part of the country, demonstrations arise, and I find myself at a crossroads. I've found through my own work and my own experience as a Black man that police abuse/brutality/neglect is a symptom, albeit a serious one, of a much larger disease. Black people are brutalized everyday by police, by a financial system that has left most of us behind, an education system that has left generations of our people handicapped in a growing world, and neighborhoods that have aesthetically chosen despair over hope. Police killings seem to be the most public and palpable display of a system that has been killing so many of us in so many different ways for so long.
I say this not to challenge the immediacy of confronting a law enforcement culture that sees Black people as a threat first and human second, but to challenge us to think about how we make our rage, our advocacy, and our resolve more robust. Policing, for all of its issues and challenges, is only a piece of the larger puzzle. What good is relief from one form of oppression, if there are others there to replace it when it's gone? Black lives matter, unequivocally. But so do Black minds, Black wallets, Black schools, and Black neighborhoods. They all matter together. These issues put together are a tall order, yes, but to not include them in the same conversations around police brutality is simply negligent.
Advocates, supporters, and the diaspora are building a soapbox for Black justice, one that hasn't been this large since the civil rights movement of our grandparents. We ought to be using that stage to talk about not just police brutality, but all forms of brutality that have left our community in despair, grieving, and broken. Moreover, we need to use the momentum and seriousness of this moment to do substantive community building. Of course, there are already many folks doing incredible work in communities of color, but not enough. Not nearly enough. When we're done on the picket lines, when the cameras dissipate, when this moment becomes an afterthought we need to ensure that we are committing ourselves to our communities. Don't just give your tweets to a hashtag, or feet to a march. Give your skills, your expertise, and your time too. Educating, uplifting, and empowering Black people; this is not the work of a few, but the work of us all.