My nephew was lynched last month in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

These are the words I have struggled to write for the past 6 weeks, but I think I'm finally ready...

My nephew was lynched on April 4, 2024, in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

That is not hyperbole or an exaggeration. 

They literally hung him from a tree with his hoodie and said he did it to himself.

We as his family and those of us who love Joshua have been stunned and shocked and frozen in our silos of grief, confusion, fear, shame, and terror. Our family trauma is heavily and thickly layered, which is partially why we haven’t said anything about it publicly yet. But when we are ready, which I think and hope will be soon, we will.

And when the time comes, I will be telling and sharing the story of his tragic and violent murder as I understand it, and asking for help and support to get some semblance of Justice for Joshua. 

But this post isn't that call to action yet…it’s just some of my processing as a queer Black womanist, minimalist, nomad, writer, activist, and as the grieving auntie of Joshua that I am, and how I believe that everything is connected…

They have never stopped lynching us.

Black people in the United States are and have been experiencing a slow and ongoing genocide for hundreds of years. 

Joshua is one of thousands upon thousands of Black people who have been lynched in the United States. And now, our family joins those thousands of Black families mourning his death, and scared that we will never know exactly what happened, and even more scared of how we live with the fact that we may never get justice or see Joshua’s murderers held accountable.

For the past 5 years, I have led groups to the lynching memorial and the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery, and to walk across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, with my Legacy Trips.

Last year, I co-founded an abolitionist movement to ban guns called Here4TheKids.

I wrote a book called, “Are We Free Yet? The Black Queer Guide To Divorcing America.”

And I have a podcast that has almost half a million downloads called Speaking of Racism.

I’m giving that brief summary about me and the work I have been doing over the past several years to give you a point of reference and an understanding of my worldview which relates to some of these connections that I am making and how I am experiencing these multiple tragedies.

My Word of the Year is Connections.

The first weekend of May, we held a funeral for Joshua in Texas.

That was the same weekend that we hosted our 20th Legacy Trip in Alabama...and it was for the Jewish community.

That very weekend, the Israeli government and the IOF was proceeding with a horrific invasion of Rafah, a brutal continuation of Israel’s current and ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, sponsored and brought to you by the US government, the Biden Administration, and your tax dollars.

That same weekend, college students across the country were setting up encampments peacefully protesting and demanding that these banks disguised as academic institutions divest from funding the genocide in Gaza, and were met with the American/Israeli Occupation forces (because what exactly is the difference between the racist American police state and the zionist Israeli settler colonial state? free health care and free education maybe?), aka the cops, and were brutalized, beaten, imprisoned, fined, evicted and threatened with losing their degrees and current and future jobs.

The violence against Black people in the US has been relentless, and never ending. I could write for hours and I still wouldn’t have enough time to name every Black person killed by white supremacy in America. An inscription at The National Memorial For Peace and Justice reads, “Thousands of African Americans are unknown victims of racial terror lynchings whose deaths cannot be documented. Many whose names will never be known. They are all honored here.”

(Consider taking some time to go through this tragic compliation of Black people killed by the police in the US and grapple with the reality of how there will never be a full, complete list of every Black death.)

Displayed on a wall at The National Memorial For Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama

Living In a History That Feels Like a Movie

I watched the movie Origin on Saturday night. The connections Isabel Wilkerson made in her book Caste between the Dalits of India, the Black people living under Jim Crow in the US, and the Jews during the holocaust in Germany is perhaps one of the most critical connections of our lifetime.

Additionally, many of us are making the connections between our global fights for collective liberation which means and requires a free Palestine, a free Congo, a free Sudan, a free Tigray, a free Myanmar, and oppressed people all over the globe to be free…

While at the same time, we are also grieving our own personal and family losses and traumas. 

Many of us are trying our best to find the will and the strength to go on another day in a society that kills children with guns in the US, and also kills children with bombs in Gaza. 

It is all connected.

Emmett Till.

Trayvon Martin.

Ahmaud Arbery.

Breonna Taylor.

All of the children killed by guns in mass shootings at schools like the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, and in Uvalde in 2022, and in Nashville in 2023, and dozens of other mass shootings that take place almost daily in the United States, making guns the number one killer of children and teenagers in America.

6 year old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab, in Gaza, and the 15k+ other Palestinian children like her.

And now my nephew Joshua, in Stillwater, Oklahoma. 

I believe Empire is falling, literally crumbling before our eyes, right now in this very moment as I type this and as you read it. We’ve already lost so many and so much in the name of white supremacy, especially in the form of anti-Black racism, zionism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, basically the caste system that is still one of the most (if not THE most) prevalent and oppressive social structure of modern history. Many of us won’t survive this. Many already haven’t.

These very connections are why my life is centered around and dedicated to honestly interrogating and asking, are we free yet? And figuring out how we can come together to get free. 

ARE WE FREE YET?

The questions I am asking myself is what connections, and disconnections, are we making with the history and information that we have, and what the fuck are we doing about it.

I don’t know what will happen next and I offer no solutions. All I have and am inviting you into are questions. 

Are we free yet? Because we must honestly look at our own lives and at the society to which we belong, and we’ve got to wrestle and come to terms with what we are doing about all these interconnected oppressive structures, and how do we go about saving all of humanity.

Here are a few questions to consider:

• In what ways am I upholding and perpetuating oppression? Am I turning away from it? Am I being silent about it?

• In what ways am I working towards personal and collective liberation?

• Do I believe that none of us are free until all of us are free?

• How am I seeing and valuing the humanity in all of us?

• Who and what am I staying connected to, and who and what am I disconnecting from? 

• And what do I want to be doing with my life at the end of humanity if we can’t fucking figure out how to stop these endless, interconnected wars at home (including in our families and communities) and abroad?

  What connections are you making and what questions are you asking?

I don’t have solutions to offer right now, but what I can tell you is that THIS IS FUCKING PAINFUL…and I believe that we must start with our own grieving and healing journey.

And what I know for sure, is that whatever happens next, we the people will decide.

That’s all I have to say for now, though there will be more in the days, weeks and months to come.

My prayer and hope for now is that my life be a living sacrifice in telling the stories of the oppressed, honoring those who have lost their lives due to the ongoing terrorism of the US Empire, and fighting for my people and my commitment to healing, liberation and love for all.  

And may we find some sort of peace and justice for Joshua, some day.

Me looking at jars filled with dirt from sites where Black people were lynched in the US at the lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, during one of my Legacy Trips in 2022.