Sonya Massey and the Recurrence of Violence Against Black Bodies
The term echolalia means the continuous repetition of a term or sound. Those of us who share in the blessing and luxury of rearing children understand just how possessive the repetition of “mommy” or “daddy” can be in the best of times; and just how corrosive to one’s mental well-being the echolalia of a determined child can be in the worst of times.
What happened to Sonya Massey is the echolalia of white American violence against Black Americans. If it doesn’t happen again today, I’m confident it will happen again soon under the auspices of a killer do deemed the killing justified.
You see, Americans, white Americans of a particular bias always find it necessary to cull the least favorable in society, as seen through their eyes. Historically, this culling happened on slave ships as they crossed the Atlantic. The weak, sick, and rebellious African stock was tossed overboard; their owner was fully reimbursed for their loss thanks to slave insurance policies of the time. I’m confident a number of these drownings were deemed justified because it was inconceivable to welcome a weak or sick or spirited slave onto American soil who was a potential threat to the health and existence of the American dream.
Later, slave overseers found it necessary to mercilessly whip the life out of lazy and impetuous slaves who thought resting from their labor midday was an undeniable necessity. Whipping a slave to death was most certainly justified. Why else would an overseer terminate a slave if not to save the spirit of other slaves who labor on the same plantation? One must root out the defective product before it ruins the bunch.
Later yet, once these same slaves were emancipated, the disgruntled former slave owners and their sadistic former overseers thought it honorable to stalk, harass, and murder Black Americans for the sanctity of the Southern white flower (woman) who wouldn’t dare touch nor imagine being touched by a Black man. The bullet-riddled Black bodies rotting in the woods became a steeple of White Redemption and White Rule, a necessary show of force, justified by the need to keep the dangerous newly emancipated Blacks in order.
Later yet, still, Black bodies were hung from trees in the suburbs as little white children waltzed by, eating popcorn and enjoying the view. The assailants, some discovered, had made eye contact with a local white woman. This grievous sin was punishable not just by death but by torture and mutilation shortly followed by death. A justifiable lynching.
Lynchings can be unjustifiable, you know.
Once enough of these public immolations took place and the scapegoats of American society, Black Americans, partnered and rounded their numbers to show that they, too, were Americans deserving of basic human rights and civil liberties, the all-too-violent lynchings subsided, for a time.
The next form of scapegoatism took on the form of public and private violence against Black bodies. Whereas the violence was ubiquitous in its previous face, it now focused on leaders of movements that sought to bring the Black body to equal status with white bodies. One leader was killed in his sleep by police officers while another was murdered while exiting his hotel room by a “rogue” assassin.
Side note: The only problem I have with the term rogue when attached to an event that keeps happening under the same circumstances where each rogue subject shares the same ideology is that for them to be rogue, they must, in fact, be operating outside of a standard narrative of motivating factors. Rogue assassins who all want to kill the same man because they all share the same ideological biases are not rogue. They’re interconnected.
The former was justified because the man who was killed in his sleep was a dangerous revolutionary. Killing him while he slept was a necessary act to protect the better institutions of the American soul.
The latter was justified because the man killed, known as King, was the most hated man in America. A suspected Communist. An agitator. A false and duplicitous Christian man of questionable morals who wanted to destroy the fabric of America by forcing Americans to do what they did not want to do. Namely, respect the Black body.
His killing, albeit not at the hands of the state, was celebrated by many as a necessary sacrifice to preserve white rule.
Lastly, as these last sixty to seventy years have shown, we have seen the continuous echolalia of Black deaths, via street-side executions or televised asphyxiations. What was initially a collective effort to control Black bodies on ships, then on land, and later on plantations, and after that in a country that prohibited Black movement, Black advancement, Black enfranchisement, Black nationality, Black civil liberties, and further yet, Black humanity under the Law, became a cultural steeple of a semi-police state to kill Black bodies with impunity with a gun, a baton, with a boot, or with one’s fists behind the cover of the thin blue line.
If I were to attempt to name every soul lost to police violence and brutality from the end of the Civil Rights Era in the 1960s to date, this conversation would last days, if not weeks. You would desecrate their memory by growing initially horrified and later bored by just how many names you would have to read. A list that grows by the day.
Today’s name is Sonya Massey.
Sonya Massey.
Sonya.
Massey.
What of tomorrow? What will the name be then? John? Sandra? Michael? Dashaun? Leanne?
Because we will have new names. America, white America to be sure, has yet to wipe away the guilt of their crimes against a whole race of people. Their attempt to sacrifice the descendants of their victims for the crimes committed against Black Americans not long ago is a suicidal cycle that has no end, solution, redemption, or conclusion in sight.
The number of Black bodies will continue to mount until the country, as a whole, as a collective, as a Union confronts its past and how that past has birthed a monster, a plague of hidden hatred that haunts us to this day.
How is it that a man, unbothered by hatred or animus toward anyone can dawn a uniform in the service of his community, under the sanction of his government, walk into a house to assist someone, and within minutes aim his service weapon at her head, and, without hesitance, shot her dead? Moments later laughing at her demise. Call her crazy.
Is this not the pathology of a mind and soul diseased by an invisible illness? An illness passed down from father to son, mother to daughter, grandfather to grandson? In the same way a venereal infection is passed down through bodily fluids, racism is passed down through the unspoken language, the words left unsaid, the stare that means more than just a stare, the community that is sapped of color and diversity; as if society has always been, naturally, segregated by nature.
Racism is so ingrained in the white American culture that to ignore it; namely, to remain quiet in the face of its existence is enough to pass it from one person to the next.
It is this disease that lives and breathes so freely in the psyche of the unsuspecting well-meaning white American who lives a life entirely free of guilt and troubles until they are faced with a Black American and, in light of some incident or other, they find themselves not only being hostile toward him but also subconsciously justifying their hostility in the name of God, country, and family.
Every nation struggles to divest itself of a social malady that plagues its society. In impoverished states like Colombia and Mexico, cartels run a gambit of drug smuggling rinks and kidnappings for ransom. A social malady created by financial instability, government corruption, societal malaise, a future sapped of hope, and an opportunity for quick cash at the expense of one’s fellow man.
The social malady that plagues the white American mind is the unspoken racism that was never excised and burned in the light of justice with the coming and passing of the generation responsible for the wrongs of the Civil Rights Era. Their failure to name and demolish the structures of racism evident in their day has produced an insidious form of the same malady that can disguise itself as terror by another name today.
Lives lost to police brutality, namely, Black lives lost to police brutality are just the new and current stage of scapegoatism. Someone has to be offered up to cover the shame of white sins. Who better to fit the mold of the cross on a lynching tree or in the comfort of their kitchen than the Black body?
Echolalia. Sonya Massay. Echolalia. Michael Brown. Echolalia. Emmitt Till. Echolalia. Martin Luther King Jr. Echolalia. Fred Hampton. Echolalia.
These people, their lives, their deaths, are but echoes that reverberate through time and space waiting to be heard one last time before something definitive is done to stop the bloodshed once and for all.
Until then… until then… until then… until then…
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
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