When You're a Black Fighter in Amerikkka (Patreon)

By Sam (@StuffFromSam) 

I have a friend who is an absolutely fantastic martial artist. If you were to make a video game character, he would be the prototype. He's been training and fighting in amateurs since he was a kid. He's a professional muay Thai fighter, having trained and fought internationally. He's also a Brazilian jiu-jitsu competitor, an instructor, and trains with pro-MMA fighters on the daily. 

He is also a Black man in Amerikkka.

With that in mind, he recently shared this with me:

As I get ready to drive to my vaccine appointment, I realized that I'm 22 years old, and I still get the same speech from my mother every single time I go out alone since I was 12 because she constantly fears for my safety due to pigs and other white suburban foolishness in general.

This used to annoy me as a kid, but when I turned 18/19, I understood why she does it and why the other parents of my BIPOC friends did the same thing. Yet when I tell white folks I know, they call it "helicopter parenting."

This may seem like a little thing to a lot of people, but the more I look back on it, the more I realize how much these deaths have traumatized Black folks for generations, whether it's conscious or not.

Trayvon Martin was three years older than me when he was murdered. Michael Brown was only two years older than me. Seeing all this while living in the suburbs made me despise everything about the suburbs, even though I was still not fully politically conscious. But being apolitical is not an option for me or other Black folks. Discovering Left politics in my later years provided a framework and analysis for why I have so much animosity for Northern Virginia as a Black person despite how "diverse" it is.

What stands out for me is how he never once mentioned how his martial arts training offers him any immunity from white supremacy. Because it doesn't.