©Ana Juan

In 2017, I wrote an essay titled “I Don’t Give a Fuck about Justine Damond,” which outlined my perspective on Ms. Damond’s death at the hands of Mohamed Noor, a Minneapolis police officer who also happened to be Somali American and Muslim. My thesis was this: How can I be concerned about a white woman shot and killed by a police officer when there are countless Black people who suffered that fate to the stunning silence and antipathy of the vast majority of white American populace?

The essay was met with the characteristic outrage from white people (but not only white people). They accused me of disrespecting Damond’s memory and being inconsiderate of her family’s feelings. I was also accused of being a hypocrite for not condemning the actions of the cop as I had in previous incidents involving Black victims. Even some of the people closest to me believed that I had crossed a line and thought that I had been too harsh in my assessment and should if not show reverence then certainly remain silent on the matter.

But I could do neither, not with the blood of Black people flowing endlessly in the streets. I insisted that there was a purpose to my position. I had predicted that the outcome of Damond’s death would be unique and that, unlike in the numerous cases in which the murder of a Black person by state agents was considered “justified” and the agents themselves regarded as valiant, the officer who killed Damond wouldn’t have access to the protections or rationalizations that his white compatriots had always been given.

And I was correct.

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Original illustration © Otto Steininger

When the weather warms up I feel two things: excitement and trepidation. My body longs for the warmth of sun on my skin and my heart remembers that summer is the season of death. It has been this way for a long time, but I think I started counting when I was a teenager. That’s when I learned of the “Red Summer”; in 1919, white supremacist terrorist attacks and riots resulted in mass murder of Black civilians in more than three dozen cities across the United States. Often in the summer I am in the presence of young people who, as teenagers, are just coming into their awareness of the brutality that is cyclically enacted against Black people. Often I need to hold space for their rage, their grief, their fear. I am tired of summers beginning this way.

A short while ago, as I was nursing my son, I scrolled through the New York Times. Reporting about Ahmaud Arbery caught my eye. I clicked on a video link. Though I didn’t intend to, I saw the cell phone footage of his murder. I saw him running as pickup trucks bore down on him, I saw armed white men jump from their vehicles. I saw the buckshot disperse into and out of Ahmaud’s body. I saw him turn to run and fall.

I thought of how we often see Black bodies running, bodies like his in particular—peak fitness and youth and promise. Sprinting, turning on a dime, twisting and perhaps catching a long pass to run a touchdown. Instead, Ahmaud turned, picked up his knee to run, and fell forward, succumbing to the wounds of shotgun blasts to his chest.

I felt my spirit crumple as his body did. It stole my breath and ignited a raging panic in my flesh. My heart pounded with a drumming that goes back generations. My body remembered nursing my firstborn son while protesters marched past my house to demand justice for Philando Castile. My body remembers.

But then something else caught my eye. It was the white man who shot him. It was how he looked down at the human being he’d just mortally wounded. It was the conviction on his face. The posture eerily reminiscent of so many white men who have walked away from the violence they’ve enacted against, in particular, Black men. Black men who, in a fair fight, would’ve wiped the floor with them. But this fight, since the beginning, has never been fair. The deck has always been stacked against us. This fight goes looking for our young, proud, strong men. It hunts them. It runs them down in pickup trucks. It demands their attention, even when it has no authority to do so. It is staggered by the grace and beauty and freedom it sees in what it chases. It wants it and extinguishes it instead.

As a stage director I am trained to watch how people move and to interpret meaning—to read their bodies. As an American I am also trained to read bodies and see race. And, like looking through a pair of binoculars, these two lenses perfectly aligned in the moment after Ahmaud fell, magnifying the embodiment of white supremacy in his murderer. The way that man bore up. The way he turned and walked back to his truck, to his father, a shotgun slung low in his hand. It was in his shoulders, his jaw, his waist, his hips. I saw it come over him and I saw him stand up in it and move with it and, though he didn’t say the words, they were all over him: Take that, nigger. I realized I was watching thousands of white men throughout American history standing over a broken Black body, their breath ragged, adrenaline cresting, spent, feeling legitimated by the proof of their violence. It is more than a rash decision; their bodies betray an assumptive birthright. Their bodies firm up and swagger into a ritualistic circle of savagery. It is a possession.

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