There is enormous privilege in being able to choose where one belongs. The family my husband and I made came from Nigerian immigrants to the US on one side, descendants of stolen Africans and their captors on the other, and we were choosing to live in a country that is the root of the plunder on both sides. We chose London because in that city most police do not carry guns and because in the UK there were fewer police killings in one year than there were in the state of California in one week. We would joke about how when White parents considered where to live, they thought about school achievement measures, number of parks, existence of local libraries, yoga studios. Black parents like us thought about all of those things and also about all of the ways that the neighborhood could punish our children for being Black.
My husband and I thought a lot about how we wanted to raise our children, how we wanted them to learn about and experience being Black. We wanted them to know that they are connected to a Pan-African family. We wanted them to feel that they would never be alone in the world. Most of all, we wanted being Black to represent joy. When they were babies, we were so careful about buying dolls with brown skin and tightly curled hair, about reading books with carefree Black children who weren’t overcoming anything or being Symbols of Struggle. We thought there was plenty of time to fill them up with love before they found out that being Black could mean something other than joy.
Then after weeks of being curiously withdrawn and angry, my sweet three-year-old son told me that his London preschool teacher had called him a “stupid little Black boy.” He felt safe enough to whisper it to me only after he’d had such a bad day that I removed him from the school, only after he’d asked, “Mommy will I have to go back?” and I’d told him he’d never have to go back. I felt I had failed. Failed to prepare him, sure. (But how does one prepare a three-year-old for that? I had no idea.) Most of all, I felt I had failed because I had not anticipated the threat. I’d been watching for men with guns and had forgotten about all of the other ways to hurt a Black child.
My solution, again, was to run. The next summer, we packed up the children and went to Ghana then Senegal for several months. I will never forget the joy on my son’s face when we flew on a plane filled with brown people, when we stepped out of the airport into Accra’s warm embrace, when he played on the beach in Dakar with another brown boy he called his best friend after having met him only ten minutes before.
From that summer on, we promised the children that we would spend every summer surrounded by Black folk, by joy. The following summer we spent in Nigeria, and as soon as the children left the plane they pronounced themselves at home. Flying from Lagos to Abuja, my then five-year-old son beamed when he was invited to the cockpit and met a Black pilot and crew. He shrieked with excitement when we landed at an airport with his name, Nnamdi. An airport! With HIS NAME!! One of the children’s favorite activities was going to an indoor play attraction called Upbeat. Upbeat played nonstop Naija pop at top volume, was filled with screaming Black children literally bouncing off the walls, and was a guaranteed migraine for adults. I loved it, though, because it felt like the embodiment of Black boy and girl joy. I also loved it because I knew that the all-Black staff would never single out my children, and my children alone, for being “too aggressive.”
I couldn’t be sure how many weeks of Davido and indoor trampolines and Dakar beaches canceled out “stupid little Black boy,” but watching the children that summer in Nigeria, I felt I could unclench.
On October 3 of that year, I was in bed, pretending to be asleep. My son had woken early, as usual, and had climbed into bed. Nightmare, thirsty, needed an extra hug, or a combination of the three. When I noticed my mother had called five or six times during the night, I called her back, and she was incoherent. When she could finally speak, she said, “They killed him.” She told me that my youngest brother, Chinedu, had been tased to death by police in San Mateo County, California. For a second, I was the child and forgot I was a mother with children of my own to protect, and I screamed, “He’s dead?” I can still picture my son’s worried face and how his question “Mommy, who died?” snapped me back.
I still remember feeling, irrationally, terrified that my son being in the room when I found out meant something horrible. He kept asking who died, and I remember telling him that his uncle had died, in a car accident. What was I meant to say?
The morning was a blur of whispered phone calls as I tried to pack, book plane tickets, and keep from panicking in front of the children, who seemed to materialize in every corner in which I tried to hide. The flight was endless. Oceans of time in which to think about my brother.
Chinedu was born the day before Valentine’s Day, so close to the brother before him that people used to think they were twins. He had irresistibly chubby cheeks when he was a baby, which was unfortunate because he clearly found the resulting cheek pinching entirely beneath his dignity. He was the last of us five, and my memories of him all involve constant motion and extreme truth telling from a child who barreled everywhere on extremely bowed legs. Once, when he was three years old, he solemnly informed our Sunday school teacher that he should chew some gum because he had bad breath. (He was not wrong, and feedback is a gift.)
When he graduated from Morehouse, we were all so proud—he was smart, funny, hardworking, and incredibly kind, with an earnest streak that I found hilarious. He called me Little Big Sis, because he was six-foot-three and I am five-foot-four but still (always!) the bossy older sister.
He met a great girl, and they had a beautiful daughter, and I remember saying that I couldn’t believe that the kid whose diapers I had changed was now changing diapers of his own.
While he was studying for the GMAT, in his very early twenties, the voices started. We struggled for years to get him the right diagnosis and medications, and we were so proud of him for creating a good and kind life despite his struggles with mental health.
My brother was a kind, gentle person. He was loved by his family, yes, but he was also loved by his caseworkers, his managers at work, his friends. Even while struggling with mental illness, he brought people joy. That he would be killed by police was incomprehensible. It also felt entirely inevitable.
When I got home, the days were a horror of arrangements, the logistics of death. The very worst day, the day I’ve done my best to forget, was the day we went with my mother to see my brother’s body. She screamed for what felt like decades, and I felt every wail in my bones. I experienced them as a child watching my mother being broken, and also as a fellow mother of a Black son, and it was the most unbearable thing to witness.
Police killings of Black people are so frequent in the US that it seemed to me there should be a brochure or a website, “So Your Loved One Has Been Killed by the State,” with step-by-step instruction, discounts, illustrations. There’s the lawyer to be found, the activists to be engaged, the press to address.
In the first couple of days, my primary emotion was grief, but by the end of that long week, it had turned to rage, a focused commitment to make sure my brother’s memory was a blessing, and a promise to him and my family to seek justice.
One of the most horrible things about police killings of Black people is how the victims are immediately stripped of their humanity and convicted of their own deaths. So I wanted to make sure that we, and not his killers, told his story. I wrote a post on Facebook about my brother and about our family’s loss. I spoke to Shaun King, the antiracism activist, and he amplified my post. Overnight, my brother’s death became a national and then an international story. I did dozens of interviews, and thousands of people responded and reached out to me.