Why I Won't Stay Numb
By DANNY CHERRY Jr.
I was on my couch scrolling through Twitter last year when the corpses of two refugees appeared on my timeline. In the picture was a little girl, Valeria, and her father, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez. Valeria’s arm draped Oscar’s neck as they laid face down in the mud brown water at the American border. Her head was in his t-shirt; his arm around her small body. I was gutted. Powerless. Saddened. I also felt complicit.
I’m a young Black man from the Deep South, right in the heartland of the Confederacy. In this corner of the country, Confederate statues loom over town squares and college campuses like gods of granite and stone looking over lands they once owned and roamed. It was, and is, exhausting to be a socially and politically minded young Black man in a place where your discomfort is by design.
Because of that, I eventually made myself numb. It was my junior year when it happened. I sat on the floor of a white friend’s apartment and watched as pundits awaited the results of a police shooting trial. In the apartment were seven or eight of us, half white and half Black. We pretended to study, but snuck glances at the TV and hung on the pundits’ every word and counted every second, just to see our prediction come true: The officer was acquitted.
A dark cloud filled the room then, threatening to thunder down upon us with the force of a landmine if anyone broached the subject. And the white people did. They unwaveringly backed the officer in a way that bordered on disregard for the man who was murdered. There had been many moments like this in college, but after this one I went numb. I decided to look the other way. Those moments taught me it was better to be silent than constantly argue against policies contrary to my existence; policies I deemed cruel or unnecessary; policies that have led to death and violence.
I stayed numb for four years. But something changed in me that night I saw the picture of Valeria and Oscar. After work, I headed to the two-story, tan brick library three blocks from my house and consumed book after book of political essays, including works by Rebecca Solnit, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates. I watched video after video on philosophy and political theory, relishing the insights and lives of people like Voltaire and George Orwell. And along the way, I learned how social and political change is made.
A year has passed. Journalists have left the border and followed the breadcrumbs to some other tragedy. But in my cubicle, in between replying to customers’ emails and casual conversations around the water cooler, my mind still drifts to Valeria and Oscar and other refugees who fled the crack of gunfire in the streets of their homeland only to be met by rubber bullets at our border. I think about how we could have extended a hand, or at minimum, not stolen their children.
The next time I’m on my couch and something makes me feel powerless, gutted or saddened, I won’t just stay numb. I’ll donate money, go protest, do something, anything to make a difference. Because being apolitical is a luxury reserved only for those whose very existence isn’t at risk. I don’t have that luxury. Valeria and Oscar didn’t have that luxury. Millions of Americans don’t have that luxury. Next time, I won’t look away.
This essay is part of our Political Awakening series this month.
Danny Cherry is 26 and a native of New Orleans. He has contributed to BuzzFeed News, The Daily Beast and Truly*Adventurous, as well as X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine and Literally Literary.