TW: this piece includes an image of a corpse which some readers may find disturbing
“How many more mothers will have to mourn their sons for this to stop?"
Dea-John Reid. A 14-year-old. A child. Dea-John was verbally abused, racially abused, chased down like a wild animal and stabbed. Once in the chest. A fatal blow that killed Dea-John. On a road-side. In daylight.
The perpetrators? The murderers? Four thirty-odd year old men and two teenagers. Six people, four of which were grown men, approached two boys, racially abused them (according to reports they used the N-word and along with what I can only imagine was extremely crude and racist language) and progressed to chasing Dea-John to his death. These men had weapons, they approached this black boy aware they were going to attack him and kill him. They came motivated and driven, like an animal seeking survival. These grown men in their thirties hunted Dea-John, like a predator hunts their prey. Except this prey is a black boy and the predator is the white man. Except the motivation is to inflict hurt and pain all because of pigment, and the victim is the black body.
Tirelessly, white people use black bodies to inflict pain. Black bodies, black lives and black people are used as commodities; their physical bodies, expendable. Punching bags for hate. Outlets for anger. And their lives, disposable and replaceable. Since the beginning of racism, which is a ‘man-made’ socially constructed ideology might I add, the black body has been the focal point of white rage. The ‘different’, the ‘other’, the ‘darker’ is used for personal gain, whether that was through slavery, manual labour, for the purpose of sex and reproduction or for money and profit.
It seems the ideology that physically enslaving human beings and treating the black body as a disposable machine is a good and profitable thing never really disappeared. Rather, the notion that black people are inherently lesser, inherently weaker and inherently villains has seeped into the minds of white people, non-black people and even, unfortunately a minority of black people (but that topic of conversation is frankly too deep and complex to get into here and now). But in saying that, I’m not excusing racist as simply ‘victims’ of their ancestors' beliefs that have magically sunk into their psyche and lived on through the generations. Racism isn’t simply a generational tradition kept up by white people, or simply a matter of opinion. Racism is harboured, racism festers and racism destroys all morals in a person. It causes heinous acts to transpire, like the brutal murder of Emmett Till, Admaud Arbery, Stephan Lawrence, George Floyd and now Dea-John Reid. Hundreds of other names can fill in the gap of ‘murder of ___’ and while each name piles up and while we are forced to place young and innocent black people in early graves for simply living, it seems that we are not learning anything. We are not changing. We are accountable.
After the BLM protests last summer that occurred worldwide and still take place today, I really thought some things would change. After the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd was caught on camera and broadcasted around the globe, I really thought things would change. The buzzwords like white supremacy, white guilt, reverse racism, police brutality and white fragility were thrown around and used by more people since Floyd’s murder, to which I assumed more people understood and grasped these ideas. In retrospect this was native optimism, because what I failed to realise until the murder of Dea-John, which happened very close to home, is that merciless racists aren’t the ones picking up these books on white fragility and reading the statistics on police brutality. It only took one more murder and one more life to be brutally and violently taken for this reality to settle inside me. The reality that merciless racists aren’t going to change anytime soon. Why? Because they aren’t held accountable.
After Floyd’s murder in Minnesota and the drawn out trial, Derek Chauvin was charged with all three charges. Although this was portrayed as an achievement for the BLM movement and the fight to end police brutality, it strikes me that this is merely the bare minimum. Surely the basic act of charging and sentencing a murder for the crime of murder they committed is expected. The murderer of Breonna Taylor who was sleeping in her bed when officers raided her apartment hasn’t been charged of murder. His title as a police officer was stripped but he hasn’t been held accountable.
Some people might argue, ‘what’s the point, it doesn’t bring back the person from the grave?’. You see, by proving to the world that non-black people (majority white people) can murder black individuals without much punishment, it perpetuates racist ideas. You watch the world brush aside justice and ignore the plea for peace. In turn, you watch white people be racist with no consequence. In turn, more white people will be racist with the presumption that there is no consequence. It’s a vicious cycle that will only take more black lives if we let this go on.
The list goes on as more names are added to headstones but what we fail to realize is these aren’t just individual and isolated tragedies. There is a wider trend and pattern in those killed and those who perpetrate the killings; a pattern that shows white people as above the law, excluded from consequences and in turn black people don’t receive justice.
What probed me to write this piece is Dea-John; a death which has chilling similarities to the murder of 14-year old Emmett Till in 1955. The obvious similarity is their age and race, but what’s more striking is the manner of their murder; hunted down, attacked and murdered violently and callously by older white men for merely existing. (I can only assume for the case of Dea-John that the murderers are white as the identities of his killers haven't been disclosed).
For those unaware of Emmett Till, he was a 14 year old black child from Chicago visiting family in Mississippi. While he was in a family owned grocery store, he allegedly offended a white woman (Carolyn Bryant), the owner's wife, by wolf whistling. The white woman told her husband about the 'incident' and as any racist would in the Jim Crow era in the
South, Carolyn’s husband and his half-brother were armed as they went to Emmett’s relatives house and abducted Emmett. They beat and mutilated his body before shooting him in the head and sinking his body in the Tallahatchie river. The body was discovered mutilated and brutally contorted three days later. Following this, an all white jury deemed the men innocent of the murder, which still regarded as one of the largest injustices in civil rights history.
While I’ve focused on the US, the UK is nowhere near innocent. We all remember hearing about the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the victim in a racist attack in 1993. Lawrance, a black 18 year old, was stabbed and killed by a group of five or six ‘white youths’ on his way home from a friend's house, which is eerily similar to how Dea-John was murdered in a seemingly random attack.
Until the Mail published an article with the headline 'MURDERERS. The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us', Stephen's killers weren't publicly called out. Then in 2012 the cold case was opened again, after much appeal from the black community, Lawrance would have been yet another black person denied justice, another name on a headstone, another brother to mourn.
The saying ‘there's no such thing as bad publicity' can’t be more wrong for cases like black murders and racism. Any press that perpetuates the notion that white people are above the law and black people are passive victims only adds to the already existing notion that justice can’t be served. While these writers of newspapers, magazines and online articles are individual people talking about individual lives, they represent a larger body which discusses cases that represent larger issues; racism and the hatred of the black body. These large institutional bodies relay racist rhetoric, emphasise black suffering over justice and show the British readership how easy it is to get away with murder, in turn they allow institutional racism to prosper. And, as we all know, institutional racism is built on white supremacy. That’s how this all comes about though, right? The ideology that while people are inherently superior to non-white people which is seemingly emended in British media and won’t stop until we shout louder than the tabloids. It won’t stop until we rewrite the narrative and shift the focus onto justice, education and anti-racism.
I wanna stress how weird it is that the media is obsessed with black pain. Dea-John’s mother, who was basically forced to publicly speak on the news about the murder of her son while in a state of mourning, loss and panic, talked about her loss and the media ate it up.
Instead of focusing on an internal investigation of how the media itself is racist and projects racist views and propaganda; instead of reporting on the child’s killers and demanding justice; instead of bringing awareness to how Britain remains a very racist country, the press exploits black suffering for clicks. Many white people see this presentation of black suffering, talk about how awful it is and move on. Black people can’t move on.
They can’t wait at a bus stop, they can’t sleep in their own bed, they can’t buy cigarettes, they can’t go on a run, they can’t compliment a woman and, like Dea-John, even a black child can’t walk down the street.
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