Refuse to Die
Rev. Jazmine Brooks, TCR News Editor
From the moment I read about the attempted murder of Ralph Yarl and the several “neighbors” who refused his aid, all I could think was, “He was supposed to just die.” The phrase grieved and haunted me for several days until I had to put that thought on paper. Too aggravated to “theologize,” I hope you hear this cry in the spirit it was written because not only was Ralph supposed to just die, but we are all supposed to just die.
Ralph Yarl was shot by a racist white man who felt ‘scared to death’ by a 5’8”, 140-pound, Black boy who simply rang the doorbell. Maybe choosing to install a doorbell and having it rung is generally scary, but I am not convinced of that. It was Yarl’s skin- and this is a familiar story to us: Black boys being described as far bigger and older than they actually are by racists who are afraid of their skin, Black girls who are vilified and adultified by teachers and caregivers who are afraid of their skin, Black siblings who are presumed guilty by police serving as counter insurgents who are afraid of their skin, and the list goes on. There is no safe space for Black people. It seems that the only recourse is simply to cease existing since we cannot change the bodies we are born in. And I’m convinced that this is exactly what is desired–that we cease from existence.
I do not mean to make this assertion as theoretical, metaphoric, or figurative musing or even a think piece on the blatancy of American racism. I mean it literally when I say we are living through multi-layered genocide. Infant mortality rates for Black mothers, ecological warfare being waged by factories in Black communities, racial disparities in and inaccessibility of medical care, targeted alcohol and drug peddling, murdering and disappearing of freedom fighters, criminalization of Black life and hustle, poverty rates, stand-your-ground laws that only work for white citizens against Black people, all make this truth self-evident.
The politics, policies, customs, culture, and theologies of this nation all make way for our deaths. It’s built into the founding of this nation, enshrined by capitalism, and has persisted through history.
The aforementioned list is hardly exhaustive in its most imminent threats to our lives, yet they do not begin to encompass the attacks on our existential being. The attacks on our bodies are only an extension of the stripping away of our personhood in the minds and by the will of those who build the crosses we carry. The intellectually dishonest revisions of history, inaccessibility of higher education, anti-Black narratives regarding crime and economic class, monuments built to gatekeepers of our enslavement, and the farce of racial reconciliation and progress are all intended to ensure our spiritual, social, cultural, and intellectual deaths. And we die them daily.
Three “neighbors” (who do not deserve the anonymity they have been afforded as dangers to society) saw Ralph Yarl bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head and arm, and they all refused him aid. In fact, one of them saw this boy in distress and ordered him to put his hands up and lay on the ground- presumed to be a weapon. They all refused care because they did not and do not see a person when they see a Black body.
For clarity, it is not, nor will it ever be, my desire to help them see our humanity or make any moral appeals to such degeneracy but to make evident the process by which Ralph Yarl could be shot in the head for using a doorbell in the way it’s intended to be used at the moment of installation. This is the violence that whiteness demands. So, there is no morality in the preservation of whiteness as part of this process. There is no humanity in it to be redeemed. So, our hope cannot be found in fighting to be seen as full humans, attempting to prove there’s a person inside the Black body and that the body cannot be separated from the person. Our hope is instead in our will to never cease from being.
We must continue living in the fulness of our red juice joy, low-country spiritedness, ancestral song and dance, communal and inimitable languages, familial connections communicated in subtle head nods and silent dialogue, our love in a pot. Our hope is in our will to never cease from being.
Ralph Yarl faced gun violence, racial profiling, dehumanization, and possible death and fought still to be. Having been denied three times, he cried beyond his forsakenness- an assertion of his own will to live- it is not mythical but miraculous. To face death and not only respond to the pain but to cry for help because even in the suffering, there is the will and the right to exist. We deserve access to that right despite the imminent threats of death and attacks on our very being. So…
Never stop talking about it.
Never stop posting about it.
Never stop showing up.
Never stop fighting back.
This world is not fit for us, but here we are. We exist.
So, continue living.
Continue hoping.
Continue dreaming.
Continue imagining.
Continue building toward a better world.
To do this is to be alive, and that is our help.
With our hands raised in surrender, we are expected to lay down and capitulate to genocide. We are supposed to just die, but judging by the myriad of GoFundMe pages for funerals, the truth is many of us cannot afford to. Capitalism has made even death an economic weapon. We cannot afford not to keep screaming and dreaming and building. Justice and life itself depend on our staying alive. Morality depends on our staying alive. Generations hang on our will-to-be. Humanity depends on our refusal to just die.
