For the Thomases Among You

I will not cut myself to prove to you that I bleed.

If blood and teeth let loose by batons, hate, and government policy on the Edmund Pettus did not do it, my few drops will be of little consequence. If the still-soft bone fragments of four little girls being thrown about like Legos in a child’s room did not prove it, I will not donate my drops to the cause. But, perhaps, those feel too distant for you. If that be the case, if life after life becoming hashtags has not proved it, I refuse to add mine for your sake.

Video after video affirming what years of testimonies had already made known. You, however, will only Amen the testimonies of those souls without blemish—your collective imagination not able to fathom that Black bodies do indeed have value after they have left the womb. All the while, declaring that ALL of our sins were driven to the cross with the same nails.

I am not interested in holding out my hands so that the Thomases among you can run your fingers over scars left by a lifetime’s worth of microaggressions, a death by a thousand cuts. After you have felt them, you’ll return to mirror images of your flesh unmarred, not acknowledging the razor between your own teeth.

And as I scroll, soul wearied by images of Black bodies sprawled across asphalt, I am awed by your warm-and-fuzzy depictions of King. The cherry-picked quotes and sound bites misapplied let me know that you have still not beheld the man or his work up close. I am convinced, though, this is a manifestation of viewing the world through a lens created by a mechanistic curriculum that has not been calibrated to the realities of the world in which we live.

In those same desks where that lens was being fine-tuned, your body was being baptized in the waters of rugged American individualism, convincing many that you are an island unto yourself. In reality, each of you is more like a nesting doll—shaped by, protected by, and afforded the privileges of the larger piece in which you reside. No matter how far you separate the individual pieces, it is clear from which they came.

So, in this moment, I will not cut myself to prove to you that I bleed. If you want to prove your love, say my name while I live and make sure neither hand nor policy can spill my blood without consequence.