Ronnie

Dec 11, 2022

Come Home, By Ronnie Nelson

It is unfathomable the pain a Black woman must feel to hold her newborn and to know that the world will be cruel to him.

In the spring of 2003, my mother had just finished giving me a talk some variation of which countless Black children in America have had pounded into their psyche: “You have to be twice as good as them if you want to be even half as successful. They get to have excuses, you don’t.”

“They” referred to the white boys and girls I went to school with, the kids I only ever briefly considered to be any different from me, the kids I considered my friends. See, I had just gotten back my report card, and there were a few too many Cs to save me from the wrath of my mother. This wasn’t the first (and wouldn’t be the last) time I’d heard this lecture. To an eleven-year-old Black kid privileged enough to live in the suburbs and attend some of the finest public schools in the state, racism seemed like a relic of my mother’s time. I even told her as much with all the confidence and wisdom that my few years of life had granted me.

“People aren’t like that anymore, Mom! Those kids are my friends, and everyone is equal now.” She laughed with the knowledge of someone who had been born at the height of racial turbulence in America, someone who was raised in the Ida B. Wells Projects on Chicago’s South Side, someone who knew firsthand how unforgiving the world could be to a Black man, no matter where he lived or how well he played by the rules. She told me she would remind me of this conversation later in life. Frustrated at her arrogance, I assured her that she’d see I was right one day.

Funnily enough, she never did bring it up again. I remembered it all by myself a year later when I was called a nigger for the first time by one of those same friends from school. I remembered it when I was sixteen and going a little too fast in my 2001 Ford Taurus, and was stopped, frisked, and held for half an hour by six cops while a police dog sniffed my car because I “fit a description.” I remembered it on August 25, 2020, as I drove an hour and a half to Kenosha, Wisconsin, just a few hours before Kyle Rittenhouse murdered two people.

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“I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice, and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation.”

—Malcolm X

With twelve dollars in my pocket and a camera around my neck, I stood alone in the middle of Civic Center Park wondering what the hell I was doing. I knew I had come to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake; I just didn’t know what that would look like or what I could do. The seven shots to his back at point-blank range had left Jacob fighting for his life and most likely paralyzed from the waist down, but he was still alive, which was a refreshing change of pace.

Surely, there would be subsequent lawsuits and multimillion-dollar settlements, but money doesn’t bring back the dead. It doesn’t un-maim someone. It isn’t justice. There existed a divide between people who believed the police were unjust and unchecked far too often, and people who believed that the police were mostly good and selfless and that the public needed to be held more accountable. One side believed in defunding the police and providing more aid to impoverished neighborhoods in the form of job training, increased healthcare and rehab access, and housing programs to help combat high crime rates and drug addiction. The other side believed that there was a need for more police in high-crime neighborhoods, that police officers need to be able to act with impunity because of the unique nature of their job, that most cops were good, and that any evidence of racial bias was a media lie.

This latest shooting was just one of dozens that had been broadcast to the world that summer; all the headlines read the exact same way: another unarmed young Black man gunned down. All year I had grappled with different emotions—sadness, confusion, hatred. This was the first time, however, that I’d felt so fucking helpless. I couldn’t tell if it was the summation of all the sorrow I had tried to suppress and replace with rage, or if it was seeing that video and hearing those seven gunshots pierce Jacob’s flesh, but the next thing I knew I was en route to a city I’d never been to before with the laundry money from the jar we kept on top of the fridge (in case I needed to stop for gas). I had made sure to kiss my kids on their foreheads before leaving, and I made sure to be vague to my mother about what I was doing.

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere far. I’ll be back later tonight.” She raised her eyebrows a little. She could tell I was hiding something; moms are good like that.

“Okay, well, be careful. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

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On July 6, 2016, Philando Castile was shot and killed by Jeronimo Yanez of the St. Anthony Police Department. Castile’s girlfriend Diamond Reynolds and her four-year-old daughter were in the car at the time of the shooting. Yanez was charged with second-degree manslaughter and two counts of dangerous discharge of a firearm. Obviously, he was acquitted of all charges.

I heard Diamond Reynolds before I saw her, holding her own in a shouting match with one of the paramilitary-clad, AR-15-toting “Proud Boys” who had invaded the park to antagonize those who had showed up in support of Jacob and in protest of police brutality. She had driven from Minnesota with her now-eight-year-old daughter, Dae’Anna. A white woman wearing a Black Lives Matter mask asked Diamond why she would bring such a small child to such a potentially dangerous place. Without a second’s hesitation, Diamond said that it would have been irresponsible not to bring her. She didn’t say another word, and she didn’t have to.

Those of us who had brought our melanin with us to Kenosha knew exactly what she meant. Black children don’t have the luxury of being shielded from the truth about how the world sees and treats them, because it can mean the difference between life and death. I remember being awestruck at Diamond’s bravery, not for standing up to the 250-pound neo-Nazi, but for continuing to fight after everything she had already been through. No one would have blamed her if she had been too traumatized or too defeated to move on—she had every right to that pain and resignation. Instead, she did what Black women in this country have done since they were in chains: she persevered.

I watched as she moved through the crowds to speak to different groups of people, and I gripped my camera. Maybe this is what the hell I was doing in Kenosha; maybe this was how I could help. Up until that point I had only taken pictures of the police and the graffiti, but maybe, I thought, I could be a conduit for all these people to share their voices. They all had some loose connection to Jacob Blake’s story, some reason they felt compelled to be there. I thought if I could just ask them questions and share their stories, maybe more of those people who were calling protesters “Antifa thugs” could empathize with people desperate enough to crowd the streets during a pandemic and demand justice.

So I spoke to a girl who was taking selfies in front of a car dealership that had been burned down the night before. I spoke to two boys who were wearing bike helmets and carrying makeshift shields. I was speaking to Diamond when everyone in the park simultaneously received a phone alert letting us know that the 8 p.m. curfew the city had imposed was now in effect.

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On August 25, 2020, at about 11:45 p.m., seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse shot Anthony Huber, Joseph Rosenbaum, and Gaige Grosskreutz during the protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing both Huber and Rosenbaum.

I was able to get a quick minute-and-a-half interview with Diamond before she had to gather up her daughter and leave. Everyone knew what the alarm meant: people who had come to protest police brutality were now targets, while the white men with guns who had come to harass and intimidate under the guise of “protecting property” wouldn’t be touched—a song and dance reminiscent of the Civil Rights Era.

Twice as good. My mother’s words echoed in my head as I scowled at the unfairness of it all. Some people packed up and left, images of rubber-bullet wounds and people gasping from spent tear-gas canisters still fresh in their minds. Those who stayed prepared for the worst and lined up like soldiers on a battlefield, and self-appointed “street medics” double-checked their supplies. For most of the day I had made an effort to avoid the courthouse situated directly across the street from us. It had been barricaded and fortified after being one of the main targets of the previous night’s unrest.

I took a deep breath, gripped my camera tighter, and moved to the front lines.

I was taking a picture of a cop staked out on the roof of the courthouse, when Anthony Huber rode past me on his skateboard. I remember having some passing thought about how cool it was that so many different groups of people were there, and how many different allies the movement against police brutality had gained since Ferguson in 2014. I would never have imagined he’d be lying dead in the street a few blocks away in a matter of hours. I don’t think I understood the inherent danger of the situation I found myself in as I watched Proud Boys brandishing rifles and either mingling with the cops or antagonizing protesters.

“Comply or die! Black lives splatter!” one of the Proud Boys screamed as a group of them walked past us. They got some of the reactions they were hoping for in the form of people screaming back at them, but for the most part, people simply ignored them.

Across the street were a couple dozen cops, ATF, and some agents I couldn’t readily identify. They didn’t make any effort to intervene in any of the small skirmishes in the park or the surrounding blocks; they were only there to “protect the courthouse.” I wondered if the armed men terrorizing protesters in the name of “protecting property” were simply following their example.

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I could lie and say I was upset that I wasn’t there, that maybe I could have done something, but the truth is I was terrified. What if I had stayed? What if I had been in the wrong place? It was a terrible thought, but it was on a loop in my head: “That could have been me.”

I remember how badly I wanted to turn my phone off so my family would stop begging me to come home. I was sitting next to a building near the park charging my camera battery when I got a FaceTime call from the only person I had told where I was going, my girlfriend, Katie. She had called under the pretext of letting the kids say good night before bedtime, before turning the camera on herself.

“Come home,” she said in a whisper, her expression half worried, half you’re-in-so-much-trouble-when-I-see-you. I looked up at the roof of the courthouse again. The cop was still there, but he had a rifle now.

“I will soon, I’m almost done,” I said, lying through my teeth. I had decided hours before that I would see this protest through to the end and sleep in my car after. It felt like no one understood how urgent our cries were anywhere but in the streets, because that was the only place anyone was inconvenienced or unnerved. I loved the immediacy of it. It always feels like the promise of change is prefaced with “eventually,” and this was happening right now—not in four, eight, or one hundred years, now. There was none of that incremental bullshit politicians love to preach. This wasn’t kneeling, or a sit-in, or filling a city council seat and being outvoted six to one by your white colleagues. I wanted to be able to tell my son in ten years that he shouldn’t ever sit by in the face of injustice no matter who the adversary was, to show him that when the time came to step up and try to make a difference, I did.

As I sat watching the light on the camera battery blink, the crowd in the park began to grow. The police began to line up in front of the courthouse, their gas masks on and their batons out. You could sense the tension between the two sides, and the air began to feel thick. I wondered if the cops felt, like we did, that they were on the side of justice and doing the right thing. I imagined that as one cop replaced the other for a shift change, they would go home and tell their family about their day, about the dangerous people on the other side of the street, just like we would.

“You here for the protest?” a couple of kids, no older than sixteen or seventeen asked me as they walked past wearing matching shirts reading “#JusticeForJacob.”

“Yeah! Just charging.” I said, awkwardly pointing to the camera. The man on the roof was scanning the crowd through the sights on his rifle.

“You gotta bring an extra next time, man!” one of them said, waving his camera.

I chuckled a polite “Yeah” and looked back to the blinking light. It was going to be a while before my camera would be charged enough to be of any use again, but obviously there was no shortage of people who would be able to document the night.

It was about 9 p.m. when I got yet another call beckoning me home, this time from my mother. I wasn’t sure if Katie had spilled the beans, or if I had forgotten to turn off the location settings on my phone. Whatever the case, Mom knew. Surprisingly there wasn’t a lecture or any yelling.

“You need to come home,” she said matter-of-factly. Nothing more, nothing less. It was sobering, the way she phrased it. She didn’t say when I needed to come back. She was telling me that I needed to make it back home alive. For the briefest of moments, I thought about all the Black boys and Black men who’d been gunned down by white men with badges—with impunity. I thought about their mothers, who had probably given those Black boys the same lecture when they were eleven years old, mothers who knew the dangers of the world for their sons, mothers who would never be able to call their sons again.

“Okay, Mom,” I said, staring at the courthouse roof. The man with the rifle had been replaced by a different cop.

Then I went home.