I was 16 years old when it finally hit me that the police weren't there to help us. It was 1989 and a young man named Richie Luke died in police custody 90 minutes after being arrested in the lobby of the building where he lived.  He wasn't the first person this happened to in my neighborhood or anywhere else in New York. I'd heard of these things happening before but now it had happened, literally right next door.

The neighborhood organized a protest. We marched to the precinct where Ritchie had been killed. As we got closer to the precinct, my best friend said she hoped the cops didn't shoot us. I said, "They're not going to shoot us, we're just kids." She sucked her teeth and said, "They don't give a fuck about us." And I knew it was true.

Ritchie Luke was 25 years old when he died in police custody. For some reason, the article about it from 1989 makes a point of describing Ritchie Luke as "an unemployed handyman" in the very first paragraph, assigning value to his life. The arresting officers claimed they were attacked and that Ritchie died in their custody because he was banging his own head on the wall and floor of his cell. Bascially saying he caused his own death. Neighbors who saw the police take Ritchie away say he was thrown into the car like a piece of luggage. Reading that today, I wonder if he was even alive when they took him away.

Fast forward to these most recent killings by the President's Goon Squad and the quickness with which the regime acted to malign Alex Jeffrey Pretti, the man executed in the streets and on camera from mulltiple angles by ICE on Saturday. The regime also tried to dirty Renee Nicole Good, a woman who was shot the week before by ICE. Both Pretti and Good were white people armed with cellphone cameras and whistles, and both were standing up for their immigrant neighbors who are being snatched off the streets of their city of Minneapolis. That city is under seige and being held for ransom until Governor Walz turns over voter registration data and other things the president seems to want in order to suppress the vote in the state of Minnesota. The city is under siege by government agents pretending to enforce immigration policy but are really just doing the job for the money and because they get to beat up and kill people they don't like. The regime didn't even bother to malign Keith Porter it was just never reported. The public did not learn about his murder until Renee Good was killed. Porter was a Black man killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year's Eve while on his own block ringing in the new year the way a lot of Americans do. The agent and Porter were neighbors.

I saw author Angie Thomas post something on Threads that distilled what I've been thinking about as the federal government wages war Americans living in cities and states run by Democrats the president doesn't like for one petty reason or another. Civil rights and human rights are being violated — they've BEEN being violated for Black people and Indigenous people — but now this violation is spreading to everyone.

It makes me incredibly sad. I've been kinda mourning the America I'd hoped could be built ever since the majority of white Americans voted to reelect this man, knowing everything we already knew about him. If folks weren't going to listen to Black people, I had hoped that people would listen to the military generals who co-signed to this man being "fascist to the core."

I want this regime to end. My hope at the moment is coming from how skilled they are at burning illusions. Now everyone can think for themselves can see what happens when oppression is allowed to persist. Let Dead Prez tell it. Or listen to Tressie McMillan Cottam talk about it on PBS. Shout out to her because I'd been thinking about making this collage for like a month and watching this video finally spurred me to make the collage above. 

Everytime I think about just how long Black people have been trying to make everyone see the rot at the center of this country in every way we know how — through art, through letters, through personal accounts, through scientific achievements, in trying to be lilke white people with the hope that they will drop the delusion of supremacy — I feel frustration and anger. Nothing has worked.

Kendrick Lamar told us to Turn the TV Off, so I made myself a playlist. I listen to a lot of Hip Hop and to me, the best MCs are the best storytellers and the ones who point out the injustices in society.

Now that I'm using Qobuz and no longer being fed my music algorithmically, I've gone back to making myself playlists. A playlist is another way to tell a story. I'm sharing a story with you told through music. I hope you'll listen.

And if you're Black, share your playlist for the Revolution. Our story is in the music. I'd love to see this idea spread across the diaspora and through the generations.