DEAR TRAYVON: A LETTER TO AMERICA
ACTIVIST AND AUTHOR KEVIN POWELL WRITES A POWERFUL, HEARTFELT DEDICATION TO A BOY SLAIN MERELY FOR BEING BLACK IN AMERICA
Dear Trayvon:
I have started this letter to you in my head several times. I’ve also deleted it several times. It is because I am so very hurt and saddened by the verdict, and very hurt and saddened by what happened to your life. I just do not know if any words could ever capture what I am feeling in my heart, in my soul.
Although I was hoping for some form of justice, I expected the verdict, Trayvon, I am sorry to say. The night before the jury came back I went to see the film Fruitvale Station, the true-life story of Oscar Grant. Oscar was an early 20something Black man who was killed by a local transit police officer in the Bay Area while lying on his stomach with his hands cuffed behind his back. Oscar was a young Black male like you, a father of a beautiful little girl that he adored, and a person who was as complex and multi-dimensional as you, Trayvon, as any other human being. Police would later say it was a mistake. That Oscar should have been tasered, not shot with a gun. Trayvon, from the momentFruitvale Station began my body was in barbed-wire knots. The tension that ripped through my flesh was so unbearable as I watched the last day of Oscar Grant’s life unfold. I cried, we cried, many of us in that movie theater, particularly a Black woman sitting directly behind me. Crying, indeed, as Oscar said to the officer, before he was murdered, “I have a little girl. I have a little girl.” Crying because many of us feel that our lives, the lives of Black males in America, are essentially worthless. We were crying for Oscar, Trayvon, but also for you, for Sean Bell, for Amadou Diallo, and for so many Black and Latino males who’ve been the victims of police brutality, of racial profiling, of stop-and-frisk, of racial murders and lynchings that their names, like 14-year-old Emmett Till’s in 1955, have become etched in the blood-soaked soil that is as much a part of our American history as anything else.
Etched, too, Trayvon, because the racism that has afflicted our journey here in America has been swallowed by us Black folks again and again, and this is why we see Black males murdering Black males in places like Chicago, like my adopted hometown of Brooklyn, New York. We live lives of double jeopardy, wondering if we will one day die at the hands of a hateful White man or police officer, or at the self-hating hands of each other. That self-