Say Her F***ing Name!

My God daughter, I should say the Goddess Mali, won first place in her kindergarten class spelling bee. Her mom said she beat out the other children, spelling over one hundred words like "cloud" that don't come easily to a child that age. This was just what I needed to hear at the end of a day nearing the end of a week in which Black pain and suffering has flowed like blood from every television set, every radio, my pores even.

Mali's victory is something for me to rally around. I laughed out loud as I read her mother's text messages describing how Mali outshone the other children. This was the win that I needed to hear about after centuries of loss that have suddenly been concentrated into one month and replayed nightly as if we don't live it daily anyway. No small thing at all, my God daughter's win is the news I craved as I watched the usual suspects begin to line up to put down the protests in that very particular way that they have of driving the life force from a movement while clocking dollars for every broken bone, every bullet fired into Black flesh, every neck ever fractured by a noose.

Mali is our tomorrow, a confident little Black girl who knows her self-worth. She is stepping into the future in the same way that she approached that zoom classroom, assuring her mom who professed nervousness, "I got it!". And yes, I know the names of those other little Black girls and women -- Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair, Sandra Bland, Korryn Gaines, Mia Henderson, Breonna Taylor and lest we forget, Mary Turner, the pregnant Black woman who was lynched in Lowndes County, Georgia in 1918, and Mali will come to know these names too. The women will teach her, her father will teach her, and she will add names to this already long list of Black women whose futures were cut short. They will be the women killed by their partners as well as police, those who succumbed to drugs, the ones who have been jailed, sisters who died because of the lack of healthcare and those who expired due to negligent healthcare as well as those who die fighting to be free. It will become unwieldy, this tally of women lost. It has become unwieldy.

And I know that this is a huge burden for a little Black girl to bear. It weighs heavy upon the hearts of those of us who have to keep saying, "we are dying too!", victims of a protracted war that has long been carried out against the Black body, especially the female body. It is not a matter of hierarchy. We are all targets, the scope of the rifle rests as easily upon children like Tamir Rice and Korryn Gaines five year old son, Kodi, who was also shot and wounded while his mother cradled him in her arms as the Baltimore County police fired upon her, taking her life. This here, what I am trying to say is that I'm tired of saying, "and Breonna Taylor" or "what about Korryn Gaines?", and "the trans woman ___________". I suppress a scream, hold back words, but what I need to say is: SAY HER FUCKING NAME! Say it often, say it first, and say it for little Black girls like the Goddess Mali.