Diamond Reynolds was talking about getting married to her boyfriend. Growing up poor and Black in Saint Paul, she knew her way around homeless shelters and the omnipresent threat of the police. She met nice guy who worked for the school district, as introverted as she was extroverted, but who genuinely cared for her and her baby daughter Dea’Anna. They moved in together, she got a job, and the three became a family.
Diamond Reynolds was in the car when police murdered her boyfriend Philando Castile. Of the seven shots fired, a couple narrowly missed her and Dea’Anna, who was sitting in the back seat. As Philando lay dying and with the cop still pointing his gun at them, she began live-streaming on Facebook, recounting the events. She remained preternaturally calm as the cop screamed increasingly panicky commands at her. She answered his questions politely, always with a “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.” She quietly asked anyone who was listening — the cops, her Facebook friends, Jesus — to tell her her boyfriend was not dead. She kept her hands up until she was handcuffed and moved into the back of the squad car with Dae’Anna. And there, removed from police and alone with her daughter, she could finally scream and cry and grieve. “It’s okay,” said Dae’Anna as she hugged her mom, “I’m here with you.”
Black lives matter.
I do not link to the videos of the deaths of the Black men and women whose portraits I share, because while I mean to call attention to the senseless way in which they died, it is equally important that I pay tribute to the way they lived: who they were and what they did before their stories were abruptly ended. Black lives matter. (It’s also ghoulish and exploitative.)
However, I think every white person needs to watch Ms. Reynolds’ live-stream. I wrote at the start of this project that being white meant that I have the option to compartmentalize my sadness and my rage about police brutality whenever it becomes slightly inconvenient for me. By contrast, Ms. Reynolds shows in agonizing clarity that being Black requires the compartmentalization of your sadness and rage in order to simply survive an encounter with the police… and that sometimes that understanding must be learned when you are 4 years old.
