Trust me, Daughter, I feel you. I’ve been here for 63 seasons so far and, I was living in Charleston when Michael Slager killed Walter Scott. I was living in Charleston when Rev. Clementa Pinckney invited Dylan Roof into Mother Emanuel to join them in Bible study and he murdered nine people (the youngest of whom was the son of one of my high school friends, and another, Cynthia Hurd, who taught my old-assed brother about these interwebs at the library) ON my oldest son’s 34th birthday. I was involved with Black Lives Matters there with my friend, Muhiyidin d’Baha, who, needing to get away after it all, went to New Orleans and was killed riding his bike in 2018. I’ve still not been able to write about any of the feelings I cycled through during that time.

But “hopeless,” was never one of them. Tired? Yes. Angry? Hayell yes! But before hopeless, I prefer our ancestor, Fannie Lou Hamer’s, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired!” and how her work with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party changed the Democratic Party and forced LBJ into the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (I was 9 ).

We can do this, Daughter — we’ve ALWAYS been able to, and we ALWAYS will be able to. But first, we’ve got to 1), know with whom the f*ck we’re dealin’, 2) decide, we ain’t playin’ their game; 3) have our own collective game that’s absolutely different from anything anybody’s ever experienced — and mean it (Yeah, folk fell for that long-legged Mac Daddy’s bullshit, “Hope & Change” game, but what they failed to realize was, he was merely a “deus ex machina,” white folks dropped in on us all to make it seem like we were post-racial — and he and Michelle went along with it, cuz it benefitted THEM.

But I digress.

Prepare for the dirtying, Daughter. It’s already out there: Georgia man charged with killing Ahmaud Arbery previously investigated him.

Not like we don’t know how Whiteness will always blame the victim if he/she/they are Black, Brown, Red or Yellow. But hold on, there’s more to come, I’m sure — cuz they’re so predictable it’s pathetic. But neither America in particular, nor “The West” in general, can justify the hunting down and murder of that young, Black man — in the middle of the street, in broad daylight — as anything else but the same, foot-on-the-neck, wanton barbarism of the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy (see bell hooks) with which we’ve lived all of our lives in this country if we’re honest.

Don’t feel “hopeless” though — KNOW! Marley K.’s heart-wrenching, yet achingly on-point poem, The Hunting Game is a great place to start.