Michael Eric Dyson - Long Time Coming

DEAR ELIJAH MCCLAIN,

I write to you out of profound grief. It is not easy to watch the Black bodies pile up in the streets and in our imaginations as we reckon with a racial catastrophe that has haunted this nation from its first breath. When I saw the video of your fatal encounter with the police, it literally made mea grown Black man from the tough streets of Detroit teeming with mayhem and murdersweep almost uncontrollably. I suppose it was your sweet demeanor. I suppose it was your palpable innocence. I suppose it was the fact that a video was even posted. It told me from the start that the outcome wasnt going to be good, that you wouldnt survive, that your death would be another death that would happen as if it hadnt happened at all.

God, I thought, I fairly prayed, even begged, not this sweet young man, not this beautiful soul, not this humble spirit, not him, he cannot have posed a threat to anybody and surely not to cops armed with guns and batons and Tasers. All he had was a coat and a mask and a gentle bearing that enveloped his vulnerable soul as he was trying to get by on his own terms.

But those terms were soon to come to a cataclysmic end. The history of race would yet again be condensed into an interaction between the cops and a young Black anybody from Black anywhere doing Black anything on any given Black night. Yes, it was random, you were to that degree random, but it was a randomness that exists within a universe of perverse predictability that means any Black person can be targeted anywhere at any time. This reinforces the vulnerability that all of us Black folk share, and that you, sweet young Elijah, bore in your body on that fateful night.

Like all the Black deaths this nation has recently reckoned with, your loss was an egregious offense to humanity. You could have been our baby brother or son or grandson, anyone young whose life had just begun, who, like any soul, deserves to exist until time expires and space collapses in a natural rhythm of life and death. As is often the case for the Black dead, most of us got to know your name only after you were gone. With the belated circulation of the video capturing the events that led to your death, we learned that you met your fate in Aurora, Colorado. We grieve for you still.

Just twenty-three, you were a tenderhearted, beautiful young man who, in your own words, was different, because you did things like play the violin to soothe stray cats. Your co-worker said you seemed to walk with a gold orb around you. Someone called the cops on you, saying you appeared suspicious as you walked home from a convenience store in the summer of 2019, waving your arms. You wore a ski mask because your anemia made you get cold easily. When the cops arrived, you begged them to truly see you: I am an introvert, please respect the boundaries that I am speaking. You told them you were on your way home and asked them to stop being so aggressive. The interaction quickly escalated as you, all of five feet six inches and 140 pounds, tried to speak to the cops, and they refused to listen; they applied a carotid hold to limit the blood flow to your brain, rendering you temporarily unconscious. And when the Aurora Fire Rescue arrived, they administered ketamine to you in an effort to sedate you, which, in combination with the trauma you endured, was enough to eventually kill you.

Elijah, your words that evening are heartbreaking. You tried so hard to convince the police that you were no threat to anyone and a good person, much the way that George Floyd tried to convince the cops that he was not a bad guy. The string of words that flowed from your mouth as the cops brutalized you is at once sad, because you tried your best to show that you were a meek and mild soul, and enraging, because it didnt matter what you said. They were hell-bent on smashing your body into no-thing-ness, into not-there-ness.

Elijah, you showed you were a sensitive and lovely soul. You did this despite enduring bouts of crying and vomiting. Elijah, you too, like Eric Garner and George Floyd, said, I cant breathe. You told them, Im just different. Thats all. Im so sorry. You told them, I have no gun. I dont do that stuff. You promised, I dont do any fighting. Then you pleaded, Why are you attacking me? I dont even kill flies. I dont eat meat!as if your penchant for peacefulness and your dietary discipline might somehow convince them that your life was worth sparing. But, Elijah, you quickly insisted that you didnt have a sense of moral superiority over those who disagreed with your choice: But I dont judge people who do eat meat. You begged them to forgive you.

No, my lovely young friend, it is they who need to beg your forgiveness and be held accountable. Yes, it is true that a few months later one of the cops involved in your death, along with a couple of fellow officers, were fired because they took selfies near the site where you were killed, including one of the cops mimicking the very chokehold that led to your death, and as they did so they laughed with a cruelty thats hard to fathom. But that is not justice for you, Elijah. Those men who wantonly destroyed your body must be arrested and put on trial.