The Answer Is (Still) Violence

The men who kill women they are afraid of and hate.

I had this fantasy once that a potential future in a potentially quiet, Midwestern state would bring a sort of peace. That kind of promise is found readily available in Laura Ingalls Wilder and Ballerina Farm, which is something you can purchase in a jar of jam or a book.

And then every now and then, that illusion shatters. I can say now and then because I am one of those privileged Black girls. I can forget about it for a while when I look at Zillow or handmake some scones.

There are other people for whom the threat of violence does not ever blur away in theory, but is a sharp, constant reality.

I don’t know what it was for Sonya Massey. I just know she was technically lynched, shot in the head on her knees with her hands raised, for moving a pot of water and quipping to a police officer and his partner that if she was dangerous it would only be in rebuking them in the name of Jesus.

I am a strange and occasionally irritated sort of Christian. I know this already. Or maybe I am just a normal person with a flare of anger. I immediately asked God where the hell he was when Deputy Sean Greyson raised his gun and shot her in the face three times. She said your name, I beg. And now we are being asked to say hers, as Greyson’s lawyer begs to let him be released because think of his fiance.

I am not thinking of Greyson’s fiance.

I am thinking of a Police training culture that would make Greyson think shooting a Black woman on her knees in the face -who posed no danger as decided by everyone who examined the footage- was okay. And I don’t care what the department is doing now that the cover has been blown.

I think of the people who rush to say why police killing innocent or confused or mentally ill and nondangerous people is okay.

I am thinking of Sonya calling the police because she was worried about an intruder and seeking safety. Who asked them when they arrived, to not hurt her.

I am thinking of her two teenage children who now have no mother.

And I am thinking about men who, moving from department to department, collecting DUIS, abusing women and others, are taught that how they treat others does not matter.

And then I think about what does matter. Like Sonya and her body. Like Black women and women with less money and migrant women and 10 percent women being abused by their older husbands and all the women who make decisions aware of how little power in this American Life they have.

The answer to a perceived threat, of blackness and feminine agency invoking a God greater than a badge, is violence for these men.

This violence is old, and traceable in the history of policing AND in men’s relationships to women.

Hatred empowered will justify the destruction of the perceived lesser body. And do think a force that justifies executing unarmed women on their knees should be allowed to continue as it is?

Once we know what these men will continue to do, once we understand what the value is, we have to remember that this kind of violence will not end with the passage of mere time. It will end when their access to this power does.

Do not let anyone convince you otherwise.