NEWS PUTTING UP THE SIGNAL WHAT PITTSBURGH AND AMERICA NEED MOST ARE MORE BLACK HEROES
BY CAITLYN HUNTER - PITTSBURGH CURRENT CONTRIBUTING WRITER
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wo weeks ago was supposed to be a normal Monday... I woke up, made my usual latté, took a bite out of my lemon-thyme glazed donut, and mused over how wonderful my white boyfriend is. I turn to social media, look for something to inspire me, instead of remind me of the ways in which I as a Black woman constantly feel vulnerable, and then like a firestorm of murder hornets, in the span of seconds I see of the error of my mistake in checking my Instagram feed: Alone I watch as a Black man walks away from police towards his car. He pulls up his pants, perhaps still reeling from adrenaline, opens the door and a police officer grabs his white shirt. Before he can even enter the car safely, before he can tell his children who are sitting in the back seat that everything will be ok, before he can tell the police he was just trying to stop two women fighting, before the police can even identify their “assailant,” another Black man is read as a threat and his justice for being a good samaritan equates to seven shots fired into his back at close range. I watch the video fifteen times from different threads of friends who think they are helping by sharing the video without pro-
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Above:: Dannielle Brown. Right: Black Lives Matter Protesters. (Current Photos: Ed Thompson)
viding a proper trigger warning. Again and again I continue to be forced to witness Black violence that has historically been fetishized. In lynchings, white mobs would castrate, dismember, and pluck body parts of victims as souvenirs. Now, we have videos, photographs, and live feeds. The souvenirs continue and we continue to be traumatized by it. Thankfully this man survived.
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He survived in spite of police brutality. He survived a system that was designed for him to die. His name is Jacob Blake. A few evenings later I watched another video from Kenosha. A man walks calmly onto the paved blackened streets, wearing a green shirt, his trucker hat turned backwards as if he’s hunting for pheasants. A crowd of protesters disperse as you see people
run towards the shooter, now an identifiable white man, where skateboarders try to disarm him. They swarm kicking him to the ground, but it’s no use. He shoots another in the stomach. Another in the face. People run and the cops around them look onwards. One hands him a bottle of water, another salutes him. This man, who has taken the life of two people on camera, is allowed to leave the scene and at the time, is regarded as a hero. In 1889, a Black grocer named Thomas Moss defended his right to own a grocery store that sold solely to the Black community. When his white store rival William Barrett rallied other men in the community to shut him down, Barrett and his men were met with a melee of bullets from three Black men whose heroism tried to protect their community. Four days later, the men came back, now deputized by the police department, and not only lynched Thomas Moss and his colleagues, but burned down the store. 131 years later, Kyle Rittenhouse proved that white men still can enact violence under the guise and support of martial law. In the span of a week, I once again felt helpless. Like most people of color, I am fluent in the language of violence. I don’t need to contextualize it, I live it and this life at times, can be
