Got my 1st Threat

I debated if I was going to share this here. 

1 week after being honored by the NAACP, I received my first lynching threat. 

Doing the work that I do online for a decade, I’ve received some repulsive, hateful, and just downright goofy correspondence. This one infuriates me. 

It infuriates me because this is how James Byrd Jr was murdered by White supremacists, chained to the back of a pickup truck, dragged for miles, and then dumped his body in front of a church. Horrific, inhumane, deplorable beings who can’t even be called humans did that. 

That infuriates me.

It infuriates me because one thing about racists is that they immediately jump to threats of violence in order to get Black bodies and Black prior to comply. It’s those same threats that led to horrors too many to name and too many lost to our collective memory. 

That infuriates me.

It infuriates me because this person felt comfortable and safe enough to type these words onto a social media platform. Bold enough to leave these words on a post about Emmett Till, a boy, a child, who also suffered the violence of these types of monsters. 

As a mother, Emmett’s story infuriates me because he was a child. How many children like Emmett and George Stinney and Ruby Bridges and Ralph Yarl and the children of Ajike Owens will have to either suffer the wounds of hate, physically or emotionally or have their lives cut short by them? 

That infuriates me. 

What we must do now: work to make a world where bigots like this no longer feel comfortable leaving comments like this. We must, TOGETHER, make hatred of all kinds be unacceptable in the society we build together. It means speaking up. It means defending one another. It means being fiercely community-oriented and building tables from the pieces of walls we broke down. Together. 

Who is with me?