Mourning Lives Matters
Monday morning the tears of a giant covered my timeline. I hadn’t actually seen Kobe Bryant in years, probably since his last game. But now I cannot unsee the grief caused by his absence. All 7 feet of Shaquille O’neal looked small and vulnerable as he reminisced about his friend and lamented the memories they would never share. What truly broke my heart about Shaq’s reaction to the death of Kobe Bryant was the list of personal tragedies that he added it to: grandmothers, his father, his sister. I watch this 47 year old black man who spent a good chunk of my childhood actually trying to be a superhero openly weep on TNT, CNN, all over Youtube. Everywhere I looked I saw this man’s grief and I hope I see more.
Full disclosure: I'm a cynical asshole. Basketball was never my thing. My hometown hasn't had its own basketball team since the 1970s and the Wizards can go fuck themselves. All this to say I wasn't immediately aware of the gravity of Kobe Bryant's death. The streets are hurting in a way that I don’t know if I’ve seen in my adult life. It’s a level of grief unlike Nipsey, unlike Prince, unlike even Michael Jackson. Kobe’s death was the perfect punctuation on a decade that was dark in ways most of us haven’t had the time to process or the strength to acknowledge.
As much as the 2010s birthed black excellence (both in terms of the volume and quality of black art produced in this decade as well as the actual phrase “black excellence”) it was also a decade marred by black death. Personally the 2010s took my grandparents and a cousin. I watched a number of my high-school classmates pass away far too early, including Korryn Gaines’ unjust murder at the hands of the police. In Korryn's case the watching became very literal. In the 2010s all of America became very comfortable witnessing, ignoring, and moving on from black death.
The murder of Trayvon Martin redefined what it meant to be black in this country. Fueled with the audacity of hope, many of us considered the line around that slain boy’s body to be our line in the sand regarding racial injustice. Millions of young black people went to war armed with their iphones and the belief that their oversight could combat the beast that is institutional racism. They tried to watch the watchmen and hold one of America’s most dangerous institutions accountable for their actions. The entire race was thrown head first into an existential crisis as the value of black life was debated nightly on the news. Whether you marched or not, your blackness became defined by the question of how much your life mattered.
And then Kobe Bryant died. Not by police. Not by a nefarious plot. One of the greatest in his field taken from this earth, along with his daughter and another family, by an accident. A miscalculation. It’s hard to protest an accident. There’s not much left to do but feel it.