Can't Even Go Grocery Shopping

 Am I surprised?

No.

I am sad, angry, enraged.

Another eighteen year old white boy.

18.

The time he should be less than a month from high school graduation and thinking about college, he was devising ways to destroy innocent human beings because he was fed an unending diet of hate.

It was Saturday. May 14. Graduation Day for some melanated people I know and love. It was errand day and getting-ready-for-prom day and in most Black households I know, it is also chore day. 

Music was probably popping early in the morning when the Lysol came out to clean the bathrooms and kitchen counters.

Sunday dinner prep was in the making, including that trip to the grocery store to get supplies.

No one, not one of them knew that they would encounter barely-a-man armed with a weapon of mass destruction worse than anything devised in the minds of super scared white people after 9-11.

That boy was armed with over four hundred years of murderous intent just because some people were sun kissed and he was taught to believe that his pasty marshmallow skin made him superior.

He was fed a diet of this from those news channels and those video games that taught him how to not see human beings in scoring points for how many lives he can plow through in a few seconds.

Someone's son.

Some white woman who was raising her son the same time I was raising my eighteen year old daughter. That woman raised a mass murder.

The same way that kid from Kentucky murdered people and white folks made him a national hero when he got off, heck, when he was arrested alive.

Like the white boy who went into a Black church and took out people who were praying.

Human beings.

Beyond and because of our skin color, worthy of life and love, but despised in this country that was built on our backs and born from the forced use of our wombs.

Gunned down.

Shopping for dinner.

With intent.

But you told us we were too harsh in our writing. We were too direct like the white woman principal of my daughter's elementary school when I talked with her about the racism my daughter experienced. She begged me not to write about her or them. She said I was too strong. I said my daughter did not deserve to be targeted.

All about their feelings.

They arrested that boy alive.

No drive by three-second murder because they thought a toy-gun was real, they handled that AK15 with kit gloves, probably salivating and have pleasure over that phallic symbol they all covet.

The media flipping over themselves to not call him what he is - a white supremacist mass murdering domestic terrorist who was radicalized by the bow-tie Ivy League degreed rich white boy on a racist news network who would never speak face-to-face with anyone but uses what his Daddy's blood money bought him to spread false information to gullible white folks who think one day, just one day, their white skin will get them acceptance to those elite circles.

The boy filmed it.

He uttered slurs while he murdered them.

There is no turn the other cheek, speak rationally to the pearl clenching white women who just can not believe their little boys and girls have racist bones in their bodies, there is no reasoning with them or seeking allyship, they have shown who they are.

Dante Stewart tweeted this morning, "Racism and white supremacy do not die off with time and passing generations. It is inherited and transferred. White people are more concerned about protecting a world that benefits white children than they are about dismantling a world that harms ours."

This is what all the fake white women allies in "We Out" shirts need to be talking about, not making millions on Black pain, appropriating our lives like costumes. 

I'm tired.

Tired of the workshops at seminaries.

Tired of the pink hats at protests who won't speak up for the wombs of Black women.

Tired of the scared little white boys who only feel powerful with a gun they use with impunity.

I'm tired.

Can't even go grocery shopping. Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, NY where a white boy in full military gear with a helmet camera and an assault weapon took the lives of ten Black people, injuring three others. From Conklin, NY. Not Mississippi, not Louisiana, not Alabama, but New York. Yeah, that.

Tell me again not to be angry.