honoring Trayvon’s humanity is honoring him in his purest form. the purest form of most southern black teenage boys— golds, a white wife beater, and middle fingas.

not highlighting what you think are the best parts of his story— a space program, a promising engineer, his GPA...

that shit all caters to respectability politics and the belief that excellence should absolve us of brutality.
that if we look a certain way or act nice enough, that makes us less deserving of death.

we saw the same language with Elijah McCain.

everyone thought he didn’t deserve what happened to him because he was nice and played music to animals.

he didn’t deserve what happened to him whether he was nice or was the biggest, meanest nigga in the world.

we need to step away from the pacification of black people and our stories.

we have to be nice. we can’t sell drugs. we can’t go to jail. we have to go to college.

and if we don’t? that makes us the perfect candidate for an airbrushed RIP shirt and an ABC special.

because if you think golds and middle fingers make us worthy of death, there goes me, my daddy’s family, my classmates, my brother, his friends, and most of the black south.

we can look how we want and still not deserve death.

rip Trayvon.