"Isolated incident"? Yeah. That's a whopper if ever I heard one.
You can't swing an NPR totebag around here without coming up against some kind of violence.
Last Saturday morning was Religious Coalition for Nonviolent Durham’s 31st Annual Vigil Against Violence.
We gather to remember, lament, support grieving families, and say the names of every Durham neighbor violently taken the previous year. (This was only my sixth attendance; I’m grateful for those loving RCND souls who laid this path.)
In 2021, mindful of the continuing pandemic, RCND shifted from gathering inside a church to holding the vigil outside. I like outside better. It feels more welcoming and, obviously, less “churchy.” But it was bucketing rain Saturday morning. So we moved inside.
As always, it was sad, so sad. And good — to be together, at least. There was a smaller turnout than usual (Durhamites, and Southerners in general, don’t like “weather”). My friend Leah counted 101 people in attendance, filling the small sanctuary.
There were 50 names to call.
When a name is called, the victim’s family or a volunteer stands with a name placard from the Vigil Video Meditation.
Imagine sitting in a filled sanctuary where every other person stands, slowly, one by one, holding the name of someone who was murdered. Someone who was deeply loved and is deeply missed.
Invitation to a circle
In planning the gathering, my brilliant friend Azmen suggested speaking in circle, a process and structure RCND is intentionally instantiating into all our works. Rooted in Indigenous practices, we come together, pass a “talking piece,” and listen to understand not to respond.
Five of us from different walks of RCND life were invited to speak in circle during the Vigil, to share from our hearts and to demonstrate what circle process is like.
The question we were invited to speak to was, “What does it look like to hold this together in community?”
As always, it’s moving to listen to what folks in RCND share — their experiences, their wisdom, what’s on their hearts and minds. It’s always so rich and so humbling.
When it was my turn, I had a hard time knowing where and how to start.
I think I started by saying that what it’s like, is awful.
A small word, but true. And I think I said that I’d sure rather have a different reason to come together. I’d rather be getting to know folks at a BBQ, or a dance party, anything other than under these circumstances.
And then I spoke to something related that’s burning in my heart.
And it’s funny (not ha ha funny) because I’d been turning it over in my mind, and what do you know, my friend (and RCND director) Ben had sent a text late last week about this very same thing. A sign? Knitted hearts? Great minds? Who can say.
“Investigators said this appears to be an isolated incident.”
Here in Unruly Quaker, we’ve talked before about news coverage of murders and shootings, and that concluding line: “Investigators say this incident does not appear to be random.” We talked about all the work that line does. The permissions it gives some of us to look away.
The new popular line at the end of news stories about violence? The one that Ben was noticing too?
“Investigators said this appears to be an isolated incident.”
Investigators said this appears to be an isolated incident.
Well, sure.
How many of us would like to make this feel like an isolated incident — a blip that won’t affect us or our’n?
And not for nothing, in doing so - we isolate the folks involved. We make them feel isolated. Shunned, almost. Time and again families tell us this. How alone they feel after their loved one is shot or murdered. Abandoned, their loved one forgotten or just another statistic.
OK and I also need to point out where that line came in the article about a neighbor shooting two other neighbors:
…A woman in the area said she didn't hear anything, but she is tired of how often crime happens in the neighborhood.
"It's very tiring because it happens at your doorstep or workplace like this place," said Jasmine Hudson. "Everybody including here is just tired. Tired of all this gun violence happening."
Investigators said this appears to be an isolated incident….
Uh. Ms. Hudson is telling us something important.
She is speaking my mind. “Everybody … is just tired. Tired of all this gun violence happening.”
Do I not understand the definition of isolated?
What if we told the truth instead?
What if we flipped the table? Told hard truths that go unspoken, like Ms. Hudson was trying to do?
What if we said, “Investigators said this appears to be an isolated event -maybe because they want to reassure ‘the public,’ but there’s probably not much reassuring the traumatized victims. Their families. The witnesses who heard the shots, saw the blood and suffering. The man now imprisoned and very much yes now isolated. All of us who are weary. Who are sick and tired of all this gun violence.”
What if we then said, “Together, let’s don’t look away, friends.
“Let us remember, re-member — be mindful, let it sink into ours hearts and our minds that this happened between humans like you and me. Folks who love people and who people love.
“It happened right here in our community, in a place that affected our neighbors and their neighbors. It was situated within a neighborhood (maybe your neighborhood) in our city, our state, our nation.
“Our city - Durham - a city of 434,000 souls, that suffers 35-50 violent homicides every year along with hundreds of shootings.
“Our city - that, not that long ago, intentionally attempted to decimate Black Durham by demolishing homes and businesses in established Black neighborhoods to build an ugly, loud, environmental-nightmare, six-lane freeway through the Hayti district.
The freeway severed Hayti, Durham’s HBCU — North Carolina Central University, and Black neighborhoods from downtown and Black Wall Street?
“Our city - built with deed restrictions and racial covenants. That redlined Black neighborhoods. That located its incinerators in Black and poor neighborhoods, where now high levels of lead are being detected in the earth of children’s playgrounds.
“Our city - a city that includes Durham’s PWI Duke University, which was built with wealth from tobacco plantations the forced labor of enslaved people.
“Our city - where you can’t swing an NPR totebag without hitting a hot new restaurant, cocktail bar, or generic five over one million-dollar condo development.
“AND IN OUR STATE. Our state of North Carolina - with a state legislature that continues to flirt with making concealed carry of a firearm legal without a permit. That has relaxed other gun laws, including a refusal to close loopholes that allow people who abuse their domestic partners to obtain firearms.
“Our state - whose modern death penalty is built on racist lynchings, gerrymanders its elections like whoa, and now requires ID to vote.
“And in our nation, the United States of America - founded on violently stolen land. A nation built on the attempted genocide and actual displacement of Native Americans. A nation who stole and enslaved Black people to work on plantations forced labor camps to enrich themselves. All done by white Christian men in the name of their conception of a vengeful conception of God.
“Our nation - whose ‘founding fathers’ wrote a Constitution in 1787 that expressly allowed chattel slavery despite anti-slavery petitions at the time. And continued to allow it despite more petitions and uprisings.
“Our nation - with a (poorly worded) Second Amendment enacted in 1791 that enshrined the “right to bear arms” in a “well regulated militia,” largely to allow slave owners to quickly suppress slave rebellions and murder humans attempting to escape their enslavement.”
“Our nation - that cares more about the right to bear arms than the right of our children to walk home from school, to go to school, free from the fear of being shot.
I don’t know, does THAT make these recent shootings feel like an isolated incident?
No. It does not. Not to me, it doesn’t.
What if we spoke these hard truths every time?
What if we talked to victim’s families, and folks imprisoned, and honest historians, every time? What if we talked with children, and ER workers, and social workers, and neighbors, and victims, every time?
What if we gathered together, every time, to speak these truths?
What if.
What if.
Thanks, as ever, for reading.
I’m grateful for your smart minds and your tender hearts.
XOXO
I remember living in Carrboro back in 2007 for a little under a year. Our neighborhood didn't see problems partly because all of the majority African American families knew everyone's kids. MeeMah knew who was "Miss Robinson's son" or which daughter was hanging by the package store. It reminded me that naming your community is key. Now I live in New Haven and we hide behind locked cars and our Simplisafe systems.. we've given up..
Hurts my heart. Needed to be said. Thank you. 💔