Say Her Name

If I were a real MAGA extremist, I’d be able to tell you about a specific murder trend happening in America right now, but I don’t want to get on the FBI terror watch list.

What I can tell you is this: we are living in a real-life version of The Purge. Murders are up at least 44 percent in two years.

For over two years, we heard a long list of murder victims shouted on TV every day. I know by heart the names and murder circumstances of Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud Arbury, George Floyd, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and many others.

This new trend is a little different. In fact, I couldn’t help noticing that some particularly gruesome recent killings have been met with a strangely subdued reaction by the mainstream media. Which is weird, because silence is violence.

{snip}

Last year, I arrived at a public park to retrieve one of my children from sports practice. As I pulled into the lot, I noticed a group of men hanging around a parked car. My inner systemic racist noticed that they were young, black, dressed like gangbangers, and smoking weed. My inner white privilege told me I should find a different place to park, immediately.

But I convinced myself that there was no way anything bad could happen here, in full daylight, in view of a playground full of kids, so I dismissed my inner “racist” and pulled into the lot.

I called my husband and told him, “I think I just interrupted a gang meetup. These guys look like they have guns.”

He told me to ignore my inner racist. “It’s broad daylight, you’ll be fine.”

Thirty seconds after hanging up with him, I heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire close by. At first I thought I was dreaming. How could my inner racist have been so right? And then I thought, oh no, I was correct in my assumption that these guys were sketchy, and now I’m going to die a “racist.”

The shots were very loud, because they were being fired three feet behind my car. The shooter was crouched down and aiming at the guys who had been standing around the parking lot and were now running for their lives. I watched him shoot one man in the stomach. The victim clutched his guts, screaming, and fell to the ground.

I tried to make myself as small as I could. I learned that you can’t get down very far when you’re stuck in the front seat of a minivan. The shooter kept blasting away, and I called my husband back, this time to say goodbye. He was an hour away, totally unable to help me, and I just managed to tell him what was happening. Then I braced myself in case a stray bullet came through my car, and like the racist that I am, I prayed and waited for death.

When the shooting stopped, there was absolute silence. That was the moment I was most afraid, since I assumed the shooter would be searching for a getaway car, and I was the perfect carjacking prospect, since I’d been the only other person dumb enough to park in the lot. Take another car, I silently begged. Please don’t take this one, with the toddler car seats in it. Do you know how expensive those are?

I heard sirens in the distance. I waited on the floor of my car until a cop tapped on my window. As he took my witness statement he told me, “This parking lot is a gang hangout for the Bloods. What in the world are you doing here?” “Trying not to be racist!” I almost said.

Ah, the Bloods, of course. That would explain why the guys running away had been wearing red, and why the shooter wore a blue baseball cap. {snip}

My “racism” had tried to warn me, but I didn’t listen. The cop then beckoned for me to get out and look at something behind my car. There were bullet casings all around my car, inches from my tires. “Your car is in the crime scene so we can’t let you leave,” he told me, as another cop strung yellow investigation tape around my parking spot.

{snip}

How many times have you been in this situation: someone is following you, or walks into your store, or gets into the elevator with you. You are a woman, and you are alone. You have a bad feeling about it. Maybe you’re a real racist and have read the government’s official FBI crime statistics. You know what you should do, but you can’t, because it will look racist. You let the elevator doors close, and you pray. You continue walking to your car in the deserted underground parking lot, and you don’t dare reach for your pepper spray, because if someone sees you do that, they will think you are…oops, too late, we all know what you are. Racist—and dead.

Unfortunately, the inability to act on raw gut instinct is killing innocent people; especially young white women.

Maybe if 32 year-old mother-of-two Eliza Fletcher had been a little bit more “racist,” she would not have been kidnapped, beaten, raped, and murdered in Memphis last week. A slightly more racist woman might have decided that jogging in darkness through a city with a sky-high murder rate and a woke DA who refuses to keep dangerous predators incarcerated wasn’t a good idea. A slightly more racist woman might have chosen to do a Peloton ride in her living room instead.

Last year, a beautiful young UCLA student named Brianna Kupfer was working all alone in a fancy furniture store in Los Angeles when she was brutally stabbed to death by a man who wandered in. Her gut had told her he was dangerous. She even texted her boss to report that she “was getting a bad vibe” about the killer minutes before he attacked her. Maybe if she’d been slightly more racist, she would have left the store and waited for him to go away. But instead, she dismissed her fear—perhaps because she had been instructed for years to ignore your gut feelings so you don’t look racist—and stayed put.

{snip}