On Being Exhausted of Writing About Black Death but Not Being Able to Look Away from the Death of Keenan Anderson
2023 began with the public lynching of Keenan Anderson by the Los Angeles Police Department. Keenan's cousin, a Black Lives Matter co-founder, informed the world of his death.
Over the course of several years, I have written extensively about Black Americans who lost their lives during deadly encounters with the police. Throughout my time as Chief Content Editor and Lead Writer at The North Star and well before then as a poet and essayist, I’ve spent innumerable hours sharing stories of loss involving US citizens that should have been able to survive a traffic stop, or a mental health crisis, or whose homes should not have been unlawfully invaded.
And after tens of thousands of words written to interrogate the how and why of what happened in these cases…to humanize the victims of state-sanctioned violence…to advocate for a ceasefire against Black bodies — my soul was drained and in need of a break from telling familiar stories of death and injustice.
It’s not that I launched Observations In Blackness with the intent of never writing about incidents of police violence perpetrated against Black folks, it’s just that I didn’t want my new endeavor to be inundated with blood-stained storytelling and the language of loss. The “observations” in Observations In Blackness are meant to critically examine the vast range of discourse surrounding Black American life. To interrogate the things we are thinking about, the things that bring us joy and laughter, the historical moments that thread to the present, the cultural sensibilities that create a global kinship among Black people as well the things that distinguish us from being thought of as monolithic.
I knew I wanted to write and record and conduct interviews about us as more than a dying people whose lives were easily susceptible to erasure by white supremacy and all the various identities it embodies.
But sometimes, a story of Black erasure comes around that is so disheartening that to ignore it is to ignore the discourse around surviving in America as a (presumably) free Black person. The killing of Keenan Anderson, a 31-year-old Black male schoolteacher, who was tased to death by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is one of those moments as the layers surrounding his death encompass the tenor of what much of the conversations around police violence against Black people have articulated over the past 15 years.
It’s a story that cannot be looked away from for the sake of comfort. It is a death rattle way too loud and far too familiar.
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