On Wednesday 1 February, family and friends of Tyre Nichols, along with Vice-President Kamala Harris and other representatives from the White House, gathered at the Mississippi Boulevard Christian church in Memphis, Tennessee to grieve the brutal murder of a young Black man. Such public grief on the first day of Black History Month echoes the moans of millions of Black Americans who have mourned the incomprehensible violence of the Middle Passage and auction blocks, slave patrols and lynch mobs, Klan assaults and police beatings. God only knows the name of every person who has been brutalized by the racial caste system that America’s plantation economy created.
But in this moment we must mourn and cry another pain. The men who killed Tyre Nichols were Black, as he was. This is not a case of individual racists, but another example of a policing system rabid with brutality and death. This kind of death is not new, and a true remembering of Black history must address this too. This most recent atrocity that the world witnessed in the video from Memphis is a symptom of a deeper social sickness that must be confronted before we as a nation can be whole.
