#jasmin proctor

Dear Stacey Dash, Don Lemon and all of their Black counterparts, When they come for us, They will not spare you, They will not check to see if you attended the last rally, They will not give you any benefits and your innocence will be inherently doubted, Your relaxed hair will not give them cause not to shoot you, Your children will not be treated like the plantation’s best house niggas, You will not be afforded the opportunity to pick the cotton out of your tongue, Your hair, Your teeth, To assimilate before they decimate,

They don’t want your money, They’ll call it theirs once you are gone, You cannot buy an oppressor’s mercy that believes they already own you, And your briefcase and suits and pants that were so properly being worn will be splattered canvases when they leave,

Cowards. You will watch the protestors you are too proud to join from the safety of your mansion, From the comfort of your vacation homes, Next to your White co-workers, Sip your coffee and say the blackness is too bitter to swallow without the sugar, You will call us savages, Put yourself 6 feet above us as if the dead buried themselves in this blood and soot,

When they ask you about us, You Judas us like Pontious Pilot is the interrogator, You separate, Hope they notice how hard you worked to dilute your brown, How quickly you burn your roots lest they grow in anything other than paper thin, How flat you can steamroll your tongue when you speak without the twang of your Black upbringing, And how your throat is a choir praising their White Jesus when they ask if we have a right to demand blood,

When they come for you, And they will come, The melanin you disowned will not amaze them, It will not keep them kept, They will not forgive the sin of your blackness because you’ve bleached yourself so deep your being is a temple praising the colonization of your bones, As if dirt don’t shine brightest on that kind of background, Like it ain’t the only background that’s ever mattered to them,

Remember your likenesses in Tulsa, Remember their suits and briefcases, The way they walked like corporations would bow at their feet, Remember how they came for them,

And remember the flames that made them

I take another gulp from the bottle because I never sip my drinks, I drink to get drunk and I want to get drunk as fast as I can, So I take another gulp, And I’m only getting drunker as I write this, And this must be what an addict feels like after they finally get that hit, After they finally get that hit, But I’m no addict, I haven’t drank in 10 days, I’m not recovering because no demon has damaged me, Shit I’m perfect! This bottle and the liquid sunburn inside is turning my insides cannonball into a lake of nothingness, It’s a good thing I picked something so easily accessible to break my sorrows open, Drain them into a glass and drink them dry,

“I said to leave the bombs at home!” 

Carter scolded as he snatched the round, black object from Q. I stood far away, I had a rule for explosive things: I stayed the fuck away from them. “This isn’t a bomb! It’s a smoke grenade! It’s for cover and concealment, we’re gonna need it eventually!” Q reasoned, snatching it back and shoving it inside his cargo pant pocket. I was scared. No, I was petrified, I was shitting in my boots, my heart rate was over 9,000 and I’m pretty sure my blood pressure could take on a tsunami. But we had to do this. That much I knew. I stood in the back of the dark executive meeting room that we’d turned into our hideout. This is where we’d have to get ready before the plan went into motion. This room was large, a glass table seating fifty leather business chairs extending wall to wall with two windows Lou had painted frost white to keep curious eyes away. Outside I could hear the shouting, the chants, the slurs, the hate speech boiling over with pride you couldn’t mistake for anything but rich, white, cis, male privilege. Then there was us, four Black kids from Massachusetts about to take on the biggest protest we could’ve ever devised. I’m still trying to register how this was my idea to begin with.

“Aniyah! Snap out of it and get over here!” Carter caught me drowning in my fear again, staring off at the granite walls I could never afford to have at my own house, listening to the cheers that made my blood run cold. They were cheering for a modern day holocaust of Muslims, of Blacks, of Mexicans, disguised as ID badges, “reasonable searches of perceived threatening African Americans” and deportation by threat of drone strike if they failed compliance in 5 days or less to leave the country. “You hear that?” Carter whispered, taking my face in his palm, stroking my cheek gently. I appreciated the fact that he was willing to tone down the assassin in him for 2 minutes to level with me but I hated that I needed him to. I felt so weak compared to everyone else.

Carter was always the leader. He stood 5'11" with hair too wild to tame. It had too much shrinkage to work with so he decided years ago to just let it live as is, in the tangled forest on top of his head that he kept in the shape of a perfect box somehow. His skin was the color of Axinite, eyes to match. I remember when I first met him, it was the first thing I noticed.

He caught me rushing out of the Anthropology building, large enough to be considered a church, already late to my next class but I’d decided half way through the doors to skip it. “That was the fastest sprint-give-up-and-walk combination I’ve ever seen.” He was sitting on the bench outside on his Mac Book Pro, designing a Black Lives Matter protest poster on Photoshop. Even after the university blacklisted the event, I respected that this guy was still willing to put up the poster and spread the word. That should’ve been my clue that he was a little extreme. But according to him, ”a little extreme” is better than “a lot docile”. First thing I noticed was his skin and how much it glowed. It stuck out like blue eyes on White girls always seemed to. He noticed my staring and assumed I was gawking at his hair. “If you’re gonna stare at my hair, I should at least know your name.” He glanced up from his screen to spread his lips into a smile revealing two rows of pearly whites I was immediately drawn to. “Aniyah.”

Lou and Q rolled their eyes at how soft Carter got for those few seconds. Even looking at his naturally aggressive features, I could see he was really trying to be calm for me. His jaw was sharp, most angled thing on his face aside from his nose. He always looked like he was holding back something he really wanted to say, not that he ever did that. He said whatever he felt he needed to. He was muscular, his arms and shoulders had a layer of pure muscle that never seemed to fade no matter how much he didn’t do. He was actually quite lazy sometimes, but always fit.

Lou and Q were different. Lou was almost as tall as Carter, which I think bothered him, which is why he always wore some kind of combat boots that made him match Carter’s height better. He was the definition of a light skin pretty boy. His mother was White, dad Black, had hair that was as fine as I’d ever seen on a Black boy. He’d always worn it straight until he got mixed up with Carter one day who convinced him straightening his hair to appease the White half of his family was fucked up. Lou wore his ashy brown hair in a curly man-bun on the back of his head now, which neither Carter nor myself let him live down. We make fun of it every chance we get.

And Q… Q is well, umm…

“I’m killing him the second we get out there.” Q warned, staring out of the exec door to where the noise was coming from. This outdoor stadium held twelve thousand screaming supporters for none other than Donald Trump. And here, is where we were going to make a point to this entire audience. That we would not roll over and die. We would not go silently. We would not die kneeling or with our hands up anymore. They had to know that.

“Nobody’s killing anybody, Q. We don’t need every protestor being labeled a murderer. Control yourself.”

“I’m gonna skin him, alive, and wear his carcass to his funeral just for the hell of it.”

“Stop it, that’s fucking weird, Q.”

“O I can get weirder, I’m gonna rip his—”

“Quintel! STOP! If you kill ANYONE and I mean ANYONE I am NOT going down with you! We’re not here to kill! WE don’t kill unarmed people!” Carter’s eyes bulged as he grabbed Q by his shirt and shook him slightly, peering into him. Reasoning with Q was one of the hardest things one could ever do. He deployed to Afghanistan in 2014 and hasn’t exactly appreciated how he’s still treated like a second class citizen for his skin when he risked it to save this country that does nothing but slaughter us by the hundreds. He’s experiencing the racism that Black Korean War veterans experienced on a much larger scale. But it doesn’t change how infuriating it is to be told you’re a thug and your Muslim family are terrorists after you’ve just returned from a deployment where you’ve looked a terrorist in the face, and know they look nothing like them. “I didn’t ask anyone to go down with me.” “What the fuck!” Carter let him go, running his fingers through his hair furiously. Q just didn’t get the point. Lou threw his hands down on the glass table in frustration, sick of listening to Carter trying to talk to Q. “If you kill anyone, Q, we are all getting shot by association. We didn’t come here to die. We came here to make a statement. You wanna assassinate someone, DO IT ON YOUR OWN TIME!” I shouted with as much intimidation in my voice as I could muster. My nerves were getting the best of me and I couldn’t stomach this shit already, we already had to worry about this protest a week before the Presidential election, with Trump at 70% in the polls and that 70% being manifested as the 100% here and now.  

“Let’s go over the plan,” Lou decided calmly, trying to ignore Q altogether now. He smoothed out the blueprint of the outside arena on the table, complete with schematics of every entry and exit point. Carter took one of the chairs and pulled it behind him, sitting down in front of the large map. He pointed to where we were now, Exec Office 129. “We enter through the center of the arena. Remember we have to run. We’re not exactly incognito and they will try to take us down the second they see us.” Carter gestured our clothes. Our T-Shirts with “Fuck Donald Trump”, “Black Lives Matter More Than Your Comfort” and ”Get Equality or Die Trying" would be sore thumbs in a crowd of trigger happy fingers. “The goal isn’t center stage, the goal is center of the audience. To make sure they see us. And then I start saying exactly what they need to hear.” Carter smirked and pulled the megaphone from under the table, staring at it like a second throat that everyone would respect, would take seriously, since they wouldn’t take his that way.