No Thank You
On George Floyd and Nancy Pelosi
She thanked him for his death.
No, she thanked him for his
sacrifice.
She said that his
name
the name the mother he cried out to
gave him
was now — as a result of his murder —
forever synonymous with
justice.
Because one cop got named guilty one time
not by his
peers
but by the cell phone video of a
brave Black teenager.
There is no thanking this
death.
There is nothing salvific in this
“sacrifice.”
George did not die
willingly.
He tried — with the power of the white supremacist state on his
neck
to breathe, to
live.
He did not choose his
lynching.
It is easy to point our rage at
Pelosi.
Surely she now knows
the blunder of her
blather;
the toxicity of her
tweets.
But she is merely a speaker in this
House of Whiteness we call
America.
Voicing what many White people think:
that Black people are the necessary
sacrifice
to turn the wheels of
“justice,”
whatever that word means.
The word sacrifice
from sacer
means holy.
How exactly does a Christian person
baptize a lynching as
holy
and call it
a cause for
gratitude?
What colonial progress narrative
is this
that paves the way to
a telos of
salvation
with broken
bodies?
It happens more easily than we
might think.
When our minds and vocabularies
and theologies are so
flattened and
fearful and
death-dealing
that someone has
to pay
to keep the darkness
at bay
to keep the guilt
away
to keep the American
way.
To keep feeding our ravenous
insatiable and
starved
theologies of
terror
with human
flesh.
And to call it
grace.
Better them
than us.
George’s state lynching is no cause
for thanks.
It is not
generative.
It is not
worth something.
It does not
“count.”
It is
meaningless.
A product of
the arbitrary and
armed
settler imagination
that creates
biological Blackness so that
it can be
destroyed.
No thank you.
No so-called redemptive
suffering.
No theological impulse to
fix what can never be
fixed;
to resolve what will never be
resolved;
to reconcile what will never be
reconciled;
to do
to say
anything
nothing
rather than
repent.
To proclaim change that will never
happen
because that would mean
sacrificing
power and money and control
instead of
racialized bodies.
No
thank you.
No.
