Black Lives, American Love: Essays on Race and Resilience

By D.B. Maroon

"An eloquent and perceptive series of essays on Black lives in America" — Kirkus Reviews

In this hard-hitting collection of essays, D.B. Maroon presents a personal biography of America, Blackness, and racial politics with unflinching style, and delivers a relentless truth-telling on some of the country's fiercest debates and most profound challenges.

From the birthplace of the Black Lives Matter movement to the murders of unarmed Black people, this essay collection invites readers to ask questions as much as it asks for accountability. Moving through debates on the 1619 Project to the rippling impact of resurgent white nationalism, the golden thread of each essay is the hopeful continuance of the Black community, as well as a call to greater truth as the first step toward reconcilliation.

Intersectional, personal, and ultimately centered on truth, love, and perseverance, Black Lives, American Love details and tends to the fractures in American culture. It is a meditation on how we can all do more to secure America's vastly beautiful possibilities for all its citizens, rather than a few.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781641609340

Book preview

PREFACE

I STARTED WRITING BLACK LIVES, American Love in the spring of 2020. It began as an essay about how the pandemic was affecting Black communities in America. In the long year that followed though, the essays, like the American public, began to address a wider set of events. Ultimately, the essays became a biography of American culture written from both notes in real time and stories spanning centuries.

As an applied anthropologist and CEO of an urban research and engagement institute, I am required to exercise steadfast neutrality. I work alongside Black and Hispanic communities striving to create revitalization without gentrifying. To do this, my team and I practice deep listening with people who have a full spectrum of beliefs and ideas. Our responsibility is to bring all of those beliefs and ideas together to present a multitude of perspectives while building a bridge of opportunity. It requires collaborating, and facilitating tough negotiations as people with competing interests set priorities for their community’s growth. In the process, I often make recommendations, but it’s not my place to take the side of one community voice over another. Instead, it’s my role to help differing sides make sense of each other’s positions and find the common ground to move forward. As an anthropologist doing groundwork, I believe my call is to bring other people’s voices to the forefront, not my own. This book of essays is different.

Throughout the essays in Black Lives, American Love, I share cultural histories as well as true stories from my experiences as an anthropologist working within American communities. In these pages, I do take a position. I do offer my personal opinions. In that light, writing this book has been a project of freeing my own voice to make declarations, take sides, and stake claims. Although it is liberating to offer my own views, the overarching goal of these essays is not to convince you, the reader, that I’m right. Instead, my goal is to give you a space for your own conversation. As in a talk between friends, use the stories, facts, and opinions within these essays to define your own conclusions. You’ll see as you read through that there are more questions than answers in these pages. Just as writing this book has freed my voice, I hope that reading this book will help you freely explore your own beliefs and your own answers to hard, but important, questions about American culture and your own unique role within it.

I also want you to know why the writing style in this book is multilayered. As a Black American, and as an anthropologist, switching between styles of speech is a seamless part of my everyday life. I wanted to explore writing with the same degree of code-switching that shapes my lived experience. As a result each essay displays a quilting of tones and cadences. It was a risky approach to a lengthy book, and I am grateful to my team at Chicago Review Press for supporting this project’s commitment to a genuine representation of Black code-switching’s many forms and rhythms.

I am forever thankful to my son, Elishyah, and my brother, Darius, for their unwavering support in the years it took for this project to become a book. To Monica Moore, Corrine Lambert, and my Watson family, whose love and genealogical acumen enabled me to share family stories. To all of the Black feminist authors, whose bravery and willful ingenuity helped me find my voice. And to you, the reader, for joining me on this path of asking hard questions with an open heart.

1

BLACK LIVES: TRUTH TELLING

The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.

—Ida B. Wells

IN 2012, TRAYVON MARTIN WAS murdered for walking while Black in a suburban neighborhood. He was only seventeen. At the time, I lived just twenty minutes away with my then sixteen-year-old son. Our neighborhood felt like a mirror print of where Trayvon Martin was killed: Hallmark beige-brown homes, wide driveways, manicured lawns. Neighborhood Watch signs that seemed like holdouts from the eighties were posted intermittently. A sign attached to a brick wall announced the enclave’s name to those who entered. These are unremarkable places. Places in which Black parents are nonetheless called to fear for our children’s lives.

After following him without provocation, accosting him, and then shooting him—after all that, the man who took Trayvon Martin’s life stood there. Still on the scene. Waiting for the police. Because that’s what people who feel entitled to kill our children do. They stand their ground, waiting to be affirmed in their belief that our children are not entitled to even nominal justice.

When law enforcement got to the scene, the shooter completed questioning. He was taken to the station, but not arrested. As he explained his story throughout the night, nobody notified the child’s parents. Nobody called. To tell them. Well before sunrise, the man who had shot a child was released without charge. He returned without consequence to a community where, only hours before, he’d killed the child of one of his neighbors.

The child’s parents weren’t told about their son’s death until daylight the next day. After they’d filed a missing person report to find their son, Trayvon Martin’s father was shown a picture of his murdered son and asked if it was his child.

When seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed, Black Lives Matter wasn’t a movement yet. It unfolded in his legacy. It began as a necessity made by the ugly predictability of what happened after Trayvon’s killing.

For weeks, charges remained unfiled in Trayvon’s death. The shooter was known, stated his presence at the scene, and said for the record that he’d shot the child. Three weeks after it happened, the chief of police overseeing the case went on record stating that no charges should be filed because there was nothing to dispute the claims of the man who’d shot the child. And so, initially, nothing happened. Because that’s possible in America. It is possible in our country to shoot a Black person point-blank with no provocation and go home without charges. Go home and sleep in your bed, a free person.

It required nearly six weeks of protests, national press coverage, a civil lawsuit, and many marches before the man who shot Trayvon was charged with any wrongdoing.

This has been the truth for all of America’s story. If you’re the lighter kind of white in America and you say a Black person frightened you, a Black person fought you even when you were the provocateur, it’s possible to be acquitted of murder. Likely one won’t even be charged. When charges are filed and an actual guilty verdict arrives, it’s always a relief, a shock. Let’s let that hit home: A relief. A shock. When justice is done.

The man who shot Trayvon Martin was recorded by 911 as—by his own admission—following the child down the street. The dispatcher said, Sir, we don’t need you to do that. The man, though, continued following the child. The seventeen-year-old had been walking home with a pack of Skittles from the store at a little past 6:00 PM. The man walking the streets with a gun who took the life of the child carrying only a pack of Skittles was acquitted on all counts.

Stop killing our children.

The night the news broke where we lived, I had been about to go to the grocery. There was no hashtag, no movement signs or wearable protest gear. Nothing I could grab to say to the world, This is a time to have a voice, and I’m saying, stop killing our children. So I pulled out a piece of paper and wrote on it in heavy black marker.

Stop killing our children.

The night the news broke where I live, I pinned that sign to the back of a sweater. One safety pin on each of the four corners. And I went food shopping trying to hold in tears, fear, and disappointment.

I was doing what Black mothers do and continue to do when we’re reminded how precarious our children’s lives in America are. We reach our hearts out, and we mourn our children, whoever their mother is—we mourn with their mothers. We sit in grief with their fathers. Because every one of us knows that the loss could as easily have been our own.

The Black Lives Matter movement swelled up in the failure of justice for Trayvon Martin’s death. Initially, three Black women organizers made a pointed call for action and the affirmation of our lives: Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors. From the fierce activism of these women, the next wave of action began rippling. The movement grew a foundational reach after the injustices in the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Black Lives Matter was born to tell, say, show, and declare how, all over Black America, we are unwilling to be disorganized in the face of blunt racist violence. We together said no. Said, Our Lives Matter. Our Black Lives Matter.

We stand up and bear witness here where we live. And understand that when we’re talking about the sprawling, lash-heavy effects of racism, here is never far from anywhere in America. We’re talking about witnessing and the why of it all, what we live with the stains of. We’re talking about how history is always right now. About what it was and wasn’t, save for who wrote it out. We’re talking about acknowledging what we do here in America by sorting each other out on shade with shade. On these shores. In this nation. All right here. Where we stand and live. And say, still too, this is our home. Here.

Here be our home. Too. Here, our home. Same, yet not …

In the early part of 2021, after I’d gotten vaccinated and visiting people no longer seemed like an unreasonable risk, at least not because of COVID-19, I walked a few doors down from my house and knocked on the door of a neighbor. We hadn’t had a conversation since the onset of the pandemic. For years before that first pandemic year, we’d waved a few times a day while he was outside on a smoke break and I was walking my dogs on a work break. His family, like mine, had transplanted from New York, although for us, the transplant had been by way of a California detour. Before 2020, we had never talked politics. I hadn’t even thought to broach the topic.

But then the 2020 election happened. From the sidewalk, as a passerby all through the election cycle, I watched what looked to me like a bizarre process. It went from typical candidate support to something different in short order. First, there was a Trump flag on top of the American flag. That was the standard part—choosing a candidate. Though before Trump, people used lawn signs, not flags. But okay. Then after the election results, my neighbor lowered his American flag to half-mast. A few weeks after that and before January 6, he turned his American flag upside down—the signal for distress. It’s a move that happens to violate the flag code but gained enormous popularity among supporters of the forty-fifth president after he lost his reelection.

I knocked on the door to talk. Because I wondered, given all the years before that pandemic year, how much had slipped past reparable? How disconnected or not had we really become? White nationalists had accosted me during the election cycle. How aligned was this neighbor with those others?

Xavier and his wife, Ella, welcomed me in and offered me a drink.*

Jesus, what a long year, Ella said as we all settled in chairs on the back patio. Her husband shook his head in agreement. We exchanged the prerequisite series of post–COVID social distancing first recontact questions. What was it like for you? You had to ask. Everyone. Again and again. What was it like for you? As we talked, the question arose: What had we been most afraid of as the pandemic’s first year unfolded?

Well, Xavier said, The only thing I was terrified of during that whole pandemic year, I’ll tell ya, it was running out of food. At this point, his wife broke in to confirm.

My God, yes. He was just crazy nonstop food shopping. One of our daughter’s friends asked why we had so much stuff, like stacks of food boxes … She laughed lightly and trailed off.

Yeah, man, her husband said with the heavy New York accent that had once made it possible for us to sit there together. As if a home state were enough of a bonding wire for an otherwise entirely faulty bridge.

I just … you don’t know, right? He asked, looking at me with that you know what I’m saying face. You don’t know. Are the factories gonna get hit with COVID outbreaks? Are the slaughterhouses gonna shut down? So I was like, of course, we gotta stock up. We gotta have what we need.

I nodded in agreement, having had the same approach. I eased up in late winter. But for most of the pandemic’s first year, every food shop for our house was executed at hurricane-preparation levels. Supply chains could break. Things could shut down. I agreed. Stocking up made the most sense. We agreed.

My neighbor went on, though, about what had frightened him. And then, he said, it was those, you know, Black Lives Matter or whatever you want to call them, antifa, that— he shook his head and furrowed his deep-tan brow. Whew man, that … those people … you had to be ready for that. I was ready. I was scared about what was gonna happen with that.

My neighbor took a pull from a cold beer. I sipped from my glass of water with ice. It’s better for you without the ice, room temperature, he said, and his wife nodded.

I know, I said. That’s definitely true. I just like it cold sometimes.

He smiled and turned to tell me a story of being on a job site in a nearby county and hearing voices shout Black Lives Matter.

They were shouting, coming close. I was like, ‘Whatttt the fuck? What is this?’

Then he explained how, during what he called the riots, he’d begun taking a gun with him on job sites. He’s a general contractor. Or something in that family of work, anyway.

I’d tell the people whose house I was working on, I’d tell them, ‘I’m carrying; you want me to leave it in the car? Or you’re okay with it on me?’ You know what they’d say to me? He looked me square on, "Oh no, it’s fine. It’s fine."

You … I stumbled and hesitated. You told them you were armed because of … you said you were worried about protestors? Like Black Lives Matter protestors? I asked.

Oh yeah. Yeah, he said.

In the months of 2020, when protests over the killing of George Floyd spread throughout the world, it so happened that precisely zero violent Black Lives Matter protests took place anywhere in even the most extended range of the movement’s actual birthplace of Florida. Riots by Black Lives Matter people organizing in the Florida region of the movement’s beginning simply never happened. Not once. Not one time. Not here. Protests in the birthplace of the movement were actually astonishingly muted. And not at all by coincidence.

I can’t breathe.

You can’t breathe because …

We can’t breathe.

We can’t breathe because …

Somewhere a man was singing the blues. While a woman declared not for the first time,

Racism is a five-hundred-year-long pandemic … and counting … and counting.

See, all bodies move in and out of history. But some bodies do so more dangerously positioned than others.

The Black body. Our Black body.

People want to believe that history is a steady enough line. That history will always give us an arc. That it bends toward justice. That time is a naturalized state of progress. But history isn’t like that. It has never been linear or on one route. Never been that. However much people want to believe it to be so just to manage its tumults, history is not a guaranteed maker of human progression.

True history is a little give, a little yes, a lot of no. It’s a slow sweep, a sudden snap, an astonishing shift then slide, and wide-eyed rollbacks. It is unpredictable in its outcomes. But let’s be real too. It’s predictable in the way of certain kinds of obstacles. And the history of power asked to cede has always been a story of obstacles to progress.

Sometimes, danger kills you. Sometimes danger, with its threat of death, is a process, a protocol, a lifetime. Short lifetime. Sometimes deadly is a moment. A minute. A twenty-second trigger. A nine-minute plea. A running down the roadway. A knee taken. A dream taken. A prayer only God heard. A shot. A knee on a neck. A life taken. Done. Gone. With no warning.

There’s never been a Black liberation history-making movement in America that wasn’t met with angry, terrified pushback. We sing the chorus of centuries in the key of freedom.

End slavery.

End Jim Crow.

Let Freedom Ring.

Equal Rights Equal Votes.

Black Is Beautiful.

Black Power.

Black Lives Matter.

What we see as clearly as the archival black-and-white footage revived in the backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement is the same set of accusations that’s been waged at every Black liberation movement. The only thing that changes is the slang of the times. When Black people simply say: Well, no on that inequality trip; Well, no on that less-than-half the pay while needing to be twice-as-hardworking trip; Hard pass on that equality washing because we still aren’t fully rep’d in the owner’s box / the CEO office / the board suite / the controlling interest chair; when we say No on that extrajudicial killing with impunity clause; when we say No on that perpetuating stream of voting rights denials—whenever we say any of these, let alone put all of these actions into one movement, we are labeled dangerous, upstarts, out of control, threats, outsiders, meddlers, rioters, thugs, hoodlums, troublemakers, lawbreakers, terrorists, un-American. From abolitionists in the 1700s to voting activists in the 1950s until now.

Right now.

And isn’t it a shame? The perpetuations. The willful ignorance. The willful disregard for the rights and wellbeing of Black folks simply because we’ve got an expectation that our Blackness is no more or less, that it simply is. Simply because we believe, at some point, we ought to be able to simply be. Without being accosted or murdered for walking, running, voting, sleeping, being, breathing while Black.

Ain’t it a

damn shame …

The man who lives a few doors down from me, who leaves out his house armed for the sake of fearing Black equality made manifest, that man could simply drive a twenty-minute drive. Stand in that neighborhood so nearby. See where another man’s racism got in the way of human decency. Stand where a young man was shot with a gun, probably not unlike the one he carries around. The man who lives a few doors down could go stand in that reckoning. If he cared to. Or he could drive twenty minutes the other way. And stand at the edge of a murky lake. He could read a plaque at the edge of the water. A plaque commemorating the death of another.

He could ask himself, the same as any person can ask themselves, Do I care to know the truth about the land I live on? Do I care to know the truth about the history we live in?

We should all care to know what has happened to Black people in America whenever Black people in America sing the chorus of our own freedom. Yet in the first ten years since the Black Lives Matter movement began, only nine states in the union have affirmed telling the truth about American history when it comes to Black people, while a whole twenty-four states have gone ahead and placed straight-out bans and restrictions on:

Telling The Truth.

The plaque at the edge of a lake not far from where Trayvon Martin was killed is in honor of a man named July Perry.

July Perry was a Black man who had the temerity to lead his community in an attempt to vote. July Perry led the effort to voting equality at a time when Florida boasted the largest Klan membership of any state in the country. A time when twentieth-century voter restriction laws known as white laws were still on the books in Florida.

In November 1920, after Mr. Perry spent the day trying to vote, a mob of white men went to be deputized by the county sheriff. After being deputized, the mob went to find July Perry, and once they caught him, they beat him and shot him. After killing Perry, the mob took him all the way to the neighboring city of Orlando. They hung him from a tree next to a lake in the center of the city. The point was to ensure news would spread—news about what could happen to Black folks who attempted to exercise voting rights.

The night Perry was lynched, sixty other Black people were killed. Black folk shot, beaten to death, stabbed to death. Nobody ever went to jail. The night July Perry was lynched and sixty other Black people were killed, Black people’s homes were set on fire, leaving hundreds of people to run as their community was burnt to the ground. Today, so many years later, there are still people in Black communities all over Central Florida who tell the stories of taking in those refugees of white supremacy as they fled from the burnt place they’d called home. Everywhere there are people who remember and tell the remembering.

In Yoruba, the night of fire is Oru Ti Ina.

In Swahili, the night of fire is Usika Wa Moto.

When the entire Black settlement where July Perry lived in Ocoee was burnt to the ground—Oru Ti Ina—nothing isolated had happened. Nights of fire are the truth-telling in our American story. More than fourteen hundred homes and businesses were set on fire in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. Usika Wa Moto. The whole spring into fall of 1919, from Elaine, Arkansas, to Chicago, Illinois, fires raged. Usika Wa Moto. In Rosewood, Florida, hundreds of Black families stood hiding and terrified for days in swamp waters, hiding as their town was burned crisp to ash by white supremacists with matches. Mount Zion Methodist Church in 1964 in Longdale, Mississippi, burnt to ash. Usika Wa Moto. Thirty churches were incinerated to ash in eighteen months at the hands of white supremacists in America from 1995 to 1996. Oru Ti Ina. Four little girls turned into angels on a hot Sunday in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963. Oru Ti Ina.

Oru Ti Ina. And in numbers so many, we were killed.

Usika Wa Moto. And in numbers too many, we were burnt out of our homes.

These are tellings that we share in our communities with the understanding that rarely are these parts of American history—the burning parts—going to be taught to our children in public schools. Sometimes, we tell our children as cautionary tales. Mind your place, the tale-teller is saying. Mind your manners with white people. Fires have happened. Shots have been fired. Sometimes elders will tell what happened elsewhere but not say what happened right where they’re telling the story from. Sometimes, the stories are told as declarations of what has been withstood. My grandmother rebuilt, somebody will say. My grandparents moved and started again from nothing, built it all up with their own hands, somebody will tell.

The truth is, too, that plenty of Black children don’t get told or taught our American history. They don’t get told how tens of thousands of Black Americans arrived in the post–Emancipation Proclamation early 1900s as occupants of hundreds upon hundreds of Black-managed towns and unincorporated cities, only to be burned, literally or figuratively, into nonexistence well before the next century’s arrival. Not every child knows the truths about the fires, the forced postemancipation labor, the lynchings, or the land grabs. The Stoics’ silence is a part of our ways too.

But like so much that matters greatly, whether or not children are given the details on the why, we are brought up bearing the passed-down traumas, the passed-on significations of dangers. Raised on the kind of tightly carried urgency of building and protecting that comes with a sense that everything can be taken at any moment. Because, God almighty, how it has. How it has.

And still. And yet. As the poet Dr. Maya Angelou danced her words forth from the threaded lives of our ancestors: and still we rise.

Not, as our gentleman from Massachusetts W. E. B. Du Bois had it, in a split psyche, torn between our Blackness and our Americanness. No. We rise as the