What is in a legacy?
How do you want to be remembered?
Everyone's heard it now: Charlie Kirk was brutally murdered on Wednesday, September 10. And events that followed will probably be stuff worthy of history's retelling. However you feel about him and his murder is one of the more contentious issues of this week (month? year?). I will leave that to you.
In hours that followed when he was first killed, people took to social media and expressed all kinds of things. As with most things that are the rave, I wanted to stay out of this one. I just vehemently believe that one does not need to have an opinion about everything. Then I saw too many people, Nigerians especially (some of whom I even respect), glorify an idea that was at best incomplete and at worst a complete lie.
Too often, lies speed, jump, hop, but truth just comes crawling behind and it's left to us to push it a little. So I wrote the below.
As some who studies political violence for a living, this is really bad (if that’s what this is).
Once we start justifying violence, it’s a dangerously slippery slope to even more consequential instability.
I also suspect that if this happened to someone else, Charlie Kirk would likely find a roundabout way to mock the person. After all, this was a man that said it was worth losing some lives if it meant we kept the Second Amendment.
Here is the thing though: I am determined the be a better person than him.
His manner of death wasn’t just shocking, it made me sick to my stomach, literally. It is terrifying to live in a country where such a thing could happen. But the whitewashing and declaration of this man as a saint is worrisome. So let me tell you a little about his legacy.
He said Black women did not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. This is not just hateful; it is a lie.
He said Black folks have to steal a white person’s spot to be taken seriously. Another lie.
This man, himself a college dropout, ridiculed Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Harvard-trained justice in ways not worth repeating.
He said if he walked into a plane and saw a Black pilot, he would be concerned (I'm not even sure I know or understand what this means).
Every chance Charlie Kirk got, he chose to be mean to people of my skin hue, to strip us of our dignity.
He also was a Christian (the part that endears him to Nigerians). He professed Jesus as his Lord and Savior. I have read that Bible cover to cover (more than once) and it’s hard to reconcile the Jesus I know and love with his, but I’ve since learned you can’t gatekeep the gospel. Only God truly knows our hearts and one thing about God, anyone and everyone can love him. Nonetheless, this last point cannot and will never negate preceding points.
So to see people (Black/Nigerian women especially) who never once mourned the death of little children in Minnesota (just two weeks ago and inside a church no less); in Uvalde; in Sandy Hook; who never mourned Melissa Hortman, who took bullets from a deranged man for reasons we still don’t know; who never decried the stripping of dignity of immigrants (themselves immigrants); to see them now call this man a hero has been such a tough pill to swallow.
But social media is a mirror, and it does nothing if not reveal true colors just as much as it obstructs it. We see you: immigrants, faith leaders, churches. We see you. We see your heart.
All of that said, no matter how hurt you were by this man and his rhetoric, I implore you to not respond in a wicked way. Don’t let anyone rob you of your humanity.
Love,
I
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