As Mad As A Hatter.

Adia Coulibaly for Trace Magazine

The police ruled it a suicide. The family and local community demanded an investigation. The police refused to change their ruling.

Juliana Nzita, A 16 year old Black girl, was just found hanging from a tree on church grounds in Charlotte, NC. Police have ruled it a suicide, despite hanging ourselves from trees being like the one communally agreed way Black folks ain’t killing ourselves.

Every time I go on Twitter or Facebook I learn about another recent lynching or missing Black person going mostly unreported. Half the reason I keep an active account on either of those sites is because they’re the only place I can find out about the violence happening to Black and Trans people reasonably quickly.

Non-Black and/or non-US based people often wonder why so many left-leaning Black folks in the US try to operate alternate justice systems within smaller community such as restorative justice, transformative justice, etc. when “all over the world, activists and their ancestors have fought for access to legal systems like this” and this is why.

Our legal system is explicitly designed to kill and enslave Black people. Our legal system from the cops to the lawyers and courts (one of the few times we got justice) to the prisons is legalized slavery where prisons are privatized and corporations are encouraged to maximize their profit by incentivizing every part of this system to hold as many people as possible.

Black folks can be proven innocent after years of time in prison or on death row and still killed by the state or dying in prison because the goal was never justice, it was to keep culling and controlling the Black population.

And outside of the system, we are lynched, raped, abused, trafficked, and robbed by those involved in our legal system, lives often irreparably destroyed, entire lives disappeared with no justice because that is the point, not a flaw. It’s almost always those in the legal system or their families and friends doing this, so that it can be ruled a suicide or a runaway or intracommunity issues and swept away.