So, you’re a black man. You’re married and you have three children. Despite messing up in your youth, you began to ‘straighten up and fly right.’ In your now upright state, you’ve been successful and prosperous, professionally and financially. You move your family into a nice home. The neighborhood is 70% white and 30% black. You have no problem with that, else you wouldn’t have moved there.
Just weeks after you make your move, you’re at home, minding your own business. It’s after 1AM, so minding your own business includes sleeping. Suddenly you’re awakened by the sound of a window breaking. Grabbing your legally-owned firearm, you go to investigate the source of the sound. You see a man in your home. Since you’re the only man that lives there, you know that this man doesn’t belong there and likely doesn’t have good intentions toward you and your family.
So what do you do? You bust a cap in his scummy a**. Seems reasonable. You notice the man’s accomplice fleeing from the scene.
When you go to see if you’ve killed the man, you discover that you haven’t. The man spews this bile: “good thing you shot me; I was gonna kill all you n*****s.” The urge comes up in you to finish the man off, but your loving wife intervenes. Good lady, that.
After the police arrive, do their thing and leave, you are still shaken. You reflect on the fact that your two oldest children saw you shoot a man. You reflect on the fact that, in the face of his ugly words, you were ready to put a bullet in his head this time. You reflect on your own violent past. You reflect that you had attempted to get your family away from the dangers of your hometown, Detroit, only to have the dangers, uninvited, break into your sanctuary.
So, what do you do in an attempt to make some sense of things and just to release the anger in your soul? You write an account of the incident on your weblog; a moving, harrowing account.
Most of the readers of this account are moved by it and are congratulatory toward you for your effective action.
But then there’s a reaction that you could not have anticipated: there are some that simply don’t believe that the incident really occurred.
Now trolls are a fact of life in the weblog culture, but these trolls are different. Not only do these trolls question the veracity of the story, nor do they only make petty, childish observations about the language used to tell the story.
Some even will not believe that a presumably white man, out of race hatred, would break into a black family’s house with murderous intent.
Some will even bring up race crime statistics, black murder victim statistics and the like to make their point. As if any of this stuff had anything to do with this situation.
Some will claim that, since this story isn’t automatically front page news all across the land, that the story is false. As if every instance of a man defending his home and family with a firearm made the front page in the mostly pro-gun control media.
Some even have the absolute unmitigated f***ing gall to bring up your self-admitted violent past in order to attempt to discredit your story. As if, you—and, unspoken, your kind—do not possess the ability to change.
Some have bombarded you and your web host with ugly and threatening e-mails.
It’s enough to make you wonder whether you have underestimated the hatred that exists for black people, especially those that have the temerity to defend themselves.
So, after nearly being murdered in your sleep along with your family and after being savaged in your e-mail box for the crime of not lying down quietly to die and for living to tell about it, you say "enough of this nonsense.” You cannot process the fact that some would actually begrudge you your defense of your family against a racist. The anger in your soul, which you thought to purge by releasing it in written form, is growing. You give up blogging.
*****
Do not go gently into that goodnight, Solomon Mason (S-Train). That’s what they want you to do.
NOTE: I have re-linked to this story in my previous posts on this subject.
