The hard truth I can’t ignore in Kingston Frazier’s death

Kingston Frazier was a 6-year-old boy who died from multiple gunshot wounds after his mother’s car was stolen from a parking lot with him sleeping inside while his mother stopped in at a store. Three black male teenagers were arrested and will be charged with capital murder. 

I e-mailed this reflection to a couple friends and mentors just like this, and I don’t know how else to post it.

I don’t want to be an irresponsible white voice. I don’t want to hurt people. There’s the hurt of truth that can bring good change and the hurt of words that actually do harm. Please let me know my blind spots and if this is a time when I would do more good sitting down and listening rather than speaking. I want to learn how to not be complicit in my white silence, but it feels really messy and scary to work through a constructive way of speaking. I don’t feel qualified. And I worry about my voice replacing voices of color.

I want to honor the life of Kingston. I want to honor the life of his family and the other three families involved. I don’t want to reduce Kingston to a cause. I don’t want to ride in as a knight in shining armor on my white horse as defender to black lives. I don’t want to speak as a white savior. I don’t know how to do this right, and surely I will fail in ways. Surely I am missing something or many things.

I want my fear of my blind spots and privilege being pointed out to be smaller than the opportunity of using my privilege to say something that could reach someone.

We think, “I don’t want to add to the din. People may start fighting on my page, and I don’t know what to say to them. I don’t want to add to the confusion.” I’m afraid of this, too. At some point I stopped waiting for the perfect words because the world doesn’t need my perfect words that may never come. It needs me to show up with my real, human, insufficient words. It needs me to start the work so I can learn. Because when I stay silent, I’m not getting better at speaking no matter how much I tell myself, “Someday I’ll know more about this and can speak up. Someday I’ll be more confident and able to speak publicly about this.”

I tried that for a decade. It didn’t work. What I have done, though, is watch how others I respected spoke on challenging topics, and I tried to learn from them. I practiced writing and speaking in safe places first, including the safe space of my own heart as I grappled with the darkest of questions. But I realized I was never going to be the person who was ready to speak until I started speaking.

The perfect words? I don’t have them. I have imperfect words for a system that is so far from perfect that black boys and men are killed, incarcerated, fear for their lives and their family’s lives. My imperfect words will need to do for now. We can’t wait until we find the perfect ones.

I say these things not to put the attention on myself. That is not where I want it. I say them because I know there are people reading who have had a pull to speak but have retreated from that feeling. I want to tell you: you can do this. Imperfectly. Messily. Figuring it out together. When we only hear the voices of people who sound like confident experts, those who feel far from being an expert retreat a little further.

We need your imperfect voice. You can show that you’re scared. You can show your own brokenness. When people see us speaking scared, they start to think that maybe they can speak, too. 

I can’t stop thinking about Kingston Frazier.

I see his shy toothy smile in the photo with his orange shirt. I see his head weighed down toward his shoulder as he sleeps in the back of a car at Kroger, a parking lot where I park my own car with my own little boy at least once a week. I see Kingston a few hours later in a similarly slumped position but this time dead with multiple gunshot wounds. I try not to see it, but I do. When I see it, I feel like a voyeur. When I try to look away, I feel like I’m ignoring his life, the life he lost.

I can’t stop thinking about Kingston Frazier. How his mother’s last view of him was as a sleeping angel in the backseat. How she would never see him awake again. I can’t stop thinking about the serene love I feel for my son when I see his sleeping face in the rear view mirror. It’s the kind of love that makes you feel it will all be ok.

Kingston. He stays with me. But along his side are the three young black men who will be charged with capital murder. I can’t stop thinking about them either, the one whose hands held a gun that shot a 6-year-old and the other two involved.

It makes me really uncomfortable to have these thoughts and to share them because I want to just be able to mourn the lost life of a child and to say, “We need justice. We need to find the men who did this.” But I can’t. My mind and heart won’t let me stop there. I can’t mourn his life without mourning the life that lead three young men to do something so atrocious. I can’t wonder how someone can kill an innocent child in cold blood without also wondering how we can be so cold blooded in participating in a culture that perpetuates this deep pain and violence that compromises the humanity of black men and the humanity of those who lie in their wake.

I can’t help feeling that we killed Kingston Frazier.

We killed him with our gun laws. We killed him with our underfunded, overworked education system. We killed him with our culture of violence, living in a state where corporal punishment is still legal in schools, where violence is authorized on bodies every single day. We killed him with our lack of mental health support. We killed him with our poverty that pushes parents into desperation and kids into emotional and mental instability and all kinds of malnourishment. We killed him with our low wages and the devastating disparity of opportunity for those born with dark skin. We killed him with a structural and systemic racism so deep in our society that some of us can’t even see it’s there.

“Remember: white supremacy is not a shark; it is the water,” wrote slam poet Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre.

These men, ultimately, are not the sharks. We can’t charge them, prosecute them, and have that be the end of this. It may help bring a shred of peace to Kingston’s family, but it is not the end. It is not the end of justice. It is legal justice for a heinous crime. It is legal justice for a senseless death. But where is the proactive justice for life? Where is justice for the life of black men? Where is justice for the life of black families? 

I can’t villainize the young men who did this. Part of me wishes I could, that I could just see them as monsters, as horrible human anomalies. Pure evil. But I can’t. I keep seeing them as kindergarteners smiling in their own school portraits and awaiting pizza on the last day of school. I see them sleeping in the backseat of their mamas’ car on warm, sticky summer days. I imagine them as classmates of Kingston’s. I see them as children of God, as being beloved by Him.

I can’t mourn the individual child without mourning the culture that raised the men who killed him. A child was killed. A child. It is an atrocity that we cannot fathom. A helpless, innocent life was taken. It is surely something that bears grieving when we see the most innocent among us subjected to brutal violence. It hits especially hard when we see people whose own humanity does not protect them from taking the life of an innocent. But I think about the three young men as babies, already behind before they took their first breath. I mourn all the pain they inherited.

If Kingston had been a teenager killed by other black male teenagers, we would hardly give him a second thought. If he had been 10 years older and killed by a police officer, we would have seen him on the news wearing a hood and heard speculations that he resisted arrest, he was rumored to have sold drugs, he made someone feel threatened. We would have heard every detail told in an attempt to soften the blow of a sacred human life being taken, to make us feel like he was partially to blame, that this was an unfortunate outcome of a life he chose. 

But that was not Kingston’s story. He was a 6-year-old boy, and we can’t find any reason why this happened. There is no room for understanding or empty justification or speculation. He was an innocent child. And the black male teenagers who killed him? We will say they are responsible, and yes, a person pulled the trigger multiple times, and a child died. Yes, they need to be held responsible. Yes, the family deserves justice. Yes, people make choices and should be held accountable for their choices, particularly when those choices take a life.

They thought they were stealing a car. Somewhere along the way they stole a life instead. It makes no sense. It is unfathomable. When will we see, though, that we stole their lives before they were even born? Choices were made for them before they were even born; choices not chosen by their family but by the way our society functions.

We can try to understand the circumstances that lead a person to a point of such desperation that they identify more with brutal violence than being committed to the sacred humanity of another person.

I feel really vulnerable saying all this because I don’t know how people will receive these words or how they will respond. But do you know who else is vulnerable? Black men every day they try to live. Black women every time they love a black man or birth a son.

I can’t stay silent when this is what I see:

We fear the black man walking down our street more than we fear the way our society treats black men.

We ask, “How could you leave a 6-year-old alone in a car?” more than we try to imagine the situation of a mama who needed to take a kindergartner with her on a trip to the store at 1 a.m.

We fear we will offend our friends by speaking up more than we fear the cost of our continued silence. We fear being verbally challenged by strangers more than we feel the urgency of the loss of black lives, which will keep happening if we stay silent in the midst of grave injustice. 

We are understandably outraged with the three young men charged with killing a 6-year-old, but where is the anger for their collection of life experiences and a history of violence against black bodies that lead to the point of their killing a child?

My friend Mandy said, “Who can even begin to imagine what brought the minds of such young people to a place where they would do such a thing? Whatever it was, I was certainly spared it.”

I was spared it. For those teenage boys and Kingston, it claimed them.