My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail. ‘The meek shall inherit the earth’ meant nothing to me. And so I had no sense that any just God was on my side. We spurned the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be white.
I could not retreat, as did so many, into church and its mysteries.
And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body.
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