It didn’t take long for friends to text that in fact, the active shooters were heavily armed cops, swarming the streets around one house, with the aim of evicting—by murder, as it turned out—one man from his decreased brother’s home. That man, William Hardison, had his family’s house stolen out from under him because of some tax issue, despite him going to the city to work out a deal to stave off homelessness.
It took hundreds of cops and SWAT teams from many jurisdictions most of the day to assassinate Mr. Hardison, an older Black man in a neighborhood that’s home to many other Black people of modest or low incomes alongside gentrifying forces increasingly edging them out. My body felt more reverberations of trauma, in solidarity with all of those who had to watch an army of police barricade and fully occupy many blocks around them—grime reapers in blue.
Daily life, in a blink of an eye, become thoroughly unsafe and dangerous because of police. Even the simplest things felt unnerving. For instance, the person lending me their guest room—away from home at work—texted me with fear for their cat. Had I let him outside? “My cat is pretty smart,” they wrote, plainly worried, adding that he’d likely “stay away from gunfire.”
That evening, I was scheduled to do a talk at @the.big.idea.412, hosted by @ratzonpgh. We’d been debating all day, as darkening storm clouds blotted out the sun, whether to cancel. We went ahead. On entering the Big Idea, I heard Mr. Hardison had just been killed, as the space filled up with people and heaviness. “I didn’t know what to do,” said one person. “I only knew I had to come here.”
Together, we processed, said Kaddish, and sang, enacting rituals of resistance within beloved community—not enough to save Mr. Hardison, yet essential to build more scar tissue around our wounded hearts so as to keep fighting.
#FTP
(photo: “Police don’t keep us safe” sticker, as seen on the stolen, surveilled, policed streets of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal in June 2023.)
