staceyannchinI can’t stop shaking. I can’t stop saying, “Stop killing us.” Muttering it from room to room. Stop making our death less visible than the death of others. Dead is dead. Gone is gone. Sorrow is sorrow. I can’t make sense of myself. Cannot access my own sense of self. All I see is this shaking. This rage. This unfathomable sorrow. Stop targeting Black bodies. Stop killing us. Please stop killing us. Stop muting our cry for justice. I am shaking. Listening to all these white news anchors. These entitled White men. Telling a story in which they are complicit. More and more and more white men. A sea of White men mouthing our tragedy. Where is Melissa Harris-Perry.? Where is Angela Davis? Where is Alice Walker. Mutabaruka? @Keorapetse Kgositsile? Get these white men off my fucking screen. White men. Talking about our sorrow. You cannot speak for us. You, who can barely speak in your sorrow for the slain police officers, but can speak at length with no empathy for the Black men killed by murderous cops. You cannot speak for those killed at the hands of police officers that run free. Without a lateral empathy, you cannot speak for people who look anything like me. I’m so angry. So sad. So sad. Sometimes anger and sadness is all you have. I am desperately trying to articulate it. Everything I write seems incoherent. Feels incomplete. The deaths of these two men whose murders we witnessed on video yesterday have completely disappeared from the conversation. It doesn’t have to be this way. There is room for all of it. Every time white people die, Black death is forgotten. Every time a police officer is killed, Black civilian deaths are erased. The very reason this young man, 25 years old, took up a gun is informed by this kind of one-sided coverage. This one-sided coverage is why we are so torn between mourning those men killed in the line of duty, and those who are killed by those duty bound to protect us. I cannot stop shaking/waffling between anger and a sadness I know it will take us decades to shake. The stories you tell are like bullets. Stop aiming them at us. Stop killing us. Stop killing what we have left of our already marginalized stories.