Strange Fruit

I tuned into this audio-version of The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning, Claudia Rankine’s heartbreaking examination of racial prejudice this morning. 

Rankine published this article following the slaying of the Charleston Nine, a group of churchgoers whose lives were taken by a homegrown white supremacist five years ago.

In seeking context, Rankine references the brutal murder of Emmett Till, the young African American boy beaten and drowned while visiting relatives in the South in the nineteen-fifties. The fourteen-year old, it was claimed, had drawn the ire of Mississippi townsfolk for wolf-whistling at a pretty white woman. When Till’s body was returned to Chicago in a simple pine box, Mamie Till Mobley — his mother — would make a decision that effectively changed the very discourse of racism. 

By displaying her son in an open casket, his cherubic face bloated and beaten to a pulp, she brought this systemic injustice to the attention of the world.

Human rights organizations like Black Lives Matter, founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi more than half a century on, carry on Mobley’s torch in search of an end to the madness.

And while it’s tragic to accept that a black man is worth more dead than alive, a corpse more valuable than a life well-lived, until recognition is met with collective mourning, Rankine submits that history is apt to repeat itself. 

Over, and over again.