Stacia L. Brown wears a lot of hats. The Baltimore-based single mother of a 4-year-old serves as Colorlines’ Community Engagement Fellow, teaches writing at a local college, runs Beyond Baby Mamas and Bellow, and still finds the time and energy to write–beautifully. Over the past couple of weeks, sparked by the police killing of Michael Brown, she has been writing essays about the slain teen, police brutality, parenting and black vulnerability. Brown posted what became a five-essay series on her personal website, stacialbrown.com.
Here, we share excerpts with you:
1. From "Ferguson and the Patience for The Appalled," August 18, 2014
Forgive us for retiring "We Shall Overcome" for a while. Our president was black, and his attorney general had been tasked with tending to what was left of systemic inequity. We overcame! Or at the very least, circa 2008, we felt fairly capable of overcoming.
Yes, even when we couldn’t catch cabs. Yes, even when we were stopped and frisked. Yes, even when a black Harvard historian was accused of breaking and entering into his front door. That was resolved with a beer summit, wasn’t it? Ain’t we some overcomers?
Pardon us for reeling in the wake of this latest reminder that we are still psychically, politically, horrifically, oppressed.
We watched a child bake on the asphalt on a middle American town last weekend, while the cop who killed him fled without calling in the murder or staying on the scene. And while sitting on our seat’s edge waiting for accountability, we had to reckon with the protracted dawning that no immediate responsibility would be assigned, that none of the shooting officer’s higher-ups — from his police chief to his governor — would feel the need to reprimand or hold him wholly responsible.
2. From "Ice Berg Boys: On Michael Brown and Other Lives Cut Short," August 16, 2014
Honey, here is a thing you will need to know about young black men: they are icebergs. My lord, how often they’ve been told to shine up the peak that is exposed, how thoroughly they’ve convinced themselves that what lies beneath should stay submerged. The waters are dark and frigid, but when you love any one of those iceberg boys, you will want to plumb his depths. You will long to warm him enough to lift him, to lower the water levels, to expose the many moments that he feels the need to hide. And if you succeed, what you will surely find first is fear.
3. From "A Brief History of Black Folks and Sidewalks," August 14, 2014
Henry’s Freedom Box or Freedom on the Menu; you have not heard of Emmett Till, have not seen what it seems that every black child must: his bloated, disfigured face in an open casket — but someday you will understand just how many of our horror stories begin and end with sidewalks.
Whether stepping off of them to let a white man pass or refusing to cross to one on the other side of a street in order to clear a white woman’s path, sidewalks have never been entirely inanimate for us. Our teeth have been broken against them. After tussling unarmed on one, Trayvon Martin was accused in court of using a sidewalk as a weapon, just before his blood was splattered across it. And even now, with no particular law in place to compel us, some confess to still ceding the sidewalk for white passersby, in spite of ourselves.
4: From "Stay Here," August 12, 2014
Stay here. Do whatever you can. Duck. Chant. Sob. Rail. But stay. The rest of us are running to and fro in your stead, spreading your words, your footage, your fears, your demands for a demilitarized, diverse police department. We are trying to make the world around you understand how wrong it is for police from multiple counties to bring in heavy artillery on ground and heavy surveillance in sky, in order to subdue the few of you brave enough to venture out each night in search of answers. We are trying to help you hold your county accountable for employing and protecting an officer who would flee down the same street where he opened fire on an unarmed boy and left him there, first to die, then to bleed in open view for several hour
You will never do as much damage to the town’s businesses as the damage being done to the town’s bodies. Do not try. If there will ever be a way to win, this sort of competition isn’t it. On foot, you cannot play chicken with tanks. Unarmed, you cannot play roulette with rifle-bearing riot police.
5. From "When Parenting Feels Like a Fool’s Errand: On the Death of Michael Brown," August 10, 2014
I don’t want to talk about the boy and the sneakers peeking out from the sheet crudely draped over his corpse in the street, because I have been happy this month and it is so rare that I’m happy and that you, at age 4, don’t have to touch my knee or shoulder or face and say, "What’s wrong, Mama? You sad?"
I don’t want to think of who will go out on her hands and knees to scrub what’s left of the boy’s blood from the concrete. It will probably be a loved one, her hands idle after hours of clenching them into fists, watching what used to be her breathing boy lie lifeless, as she waited and waited and waited for the police and the coroner and the county to get their stories straight and their shit together and their privilege, sitting crooked as a ten-dollar wig, readjusted till it was firmly intact. All that time they spent, just primping, just holding their whiteness and authority up as mirrors for one another, tuning out the cries of a mourning community — or garbling them, rather. Did they say, "Kill the police?!" As long as that’s the way you heard it, they did. And that is what AP will wire out to every mainstream news outlet who can be bothered to report the death of another unarmed black son on a Saturday night.
Their truth is not our truth.