'Blackness is not probable cause.'

Few are surprised by yesterday’s Grand Jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown, despite the fact that it is extremely rare for grand juries not to return an indictment. A front-page story in today's New York Times paints a picture of both rage and resignation, quoting a protestor in New York: “You’re kind of numb to it at a certain point. It’s so systematic.”

Coincidentally I’ve been re-reading Kiese Laymon’s How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, his 2013 collection of essays on being young, black, and male in the south, and it conveys the same sense of simultaneous anger and weariness.  The epigraph is by James Baldwin: “Morally, there has been no change at all, and a moral change is the only real one.” It recalls the verse, Jeremiah 6:14, making the rounds today: “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.”

In Laymon’s title essay, he recounts being pulled over by police for throwing non-existent drugs out the window of his girlfriend’s car. After he’s handcuffed and thrown in the back of a police car “for his own safety,” he comes home shaken and tries to work on his novel. He finds himself writing three times in a row: “We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.”

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