Guilt

A letter

Dear George,

After 400 years of people who look like me killing men who look like you, twelve citizens of your adopted home decided you were murdered and called the man who did it “guilty.”

I am sorry that you are dead. I am sorry for the violence and the cruelty and the dehumanity of your death — the pain and brutality of it.

I am sorry I know your name because a white cop killed you — that I did not know you as the subject of your one, unfolding, precious life.

I am sorry that whiteness — white ignorance of white fear, white fear of white fear, white fear of Blackness — killed you.

Were this verdict different — had your murderer been exonerated — I would have felt rage and disgust, sinking despair, grave futility, the insidious illness burrowing deeper somehow inside our collective rotting soul.

But found guilty, he is now the lie that we are changing our white violence fast enough.

He now will be seen as progress, a symptom of systemic justice.

You were perhaps, sir, the millionth Black man to be enslaved, incarcerated or killed by a white man entitled to his domination over you while maintaining his neutrality about you.

This man who asphyxiated you, breathes.

If you were alive, who and how would you be? I wish we had known you as you wanted to be known, to see you in the fullness of your Humanity.

Why do some whites prefer the white killing of Blacks to Black rage, Black marches, Black voices?

Why does a dead Black man, a beautiful Black man, evoke any white empathy for the white killer?

They feel his unjustified white fear and find it more human than your humanity, as if you are an aggressor by virtue of your Blackness. Then you are cast as the one responsible for white reaction to your Black existence.

My grandmother, who was white, grew Gerber daisies one year, just for me.

I bet your grandmother loved you like that. Did she grow flowers?

I hope she did not live to see you die.

I hope your children did not see you die.

Tonight I went to the grocery store after dark right before closing.

No one challenged me.

I bought two bouquets of Gerber daisies.

I thought of my grandmother.

I was thinking of you, George.