Black lives are expendable in America. And they always have been.

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In a recent New York Times interview with celebrated author Walter Mosley, who also happens to be one of my all-time favorite writers, he was reminded of a quote from one of his non-fiction books where he said that everyone should tell the truth once a day. Doesn’t seem like such a challenging goal, right?  

Wake up. Brush your teeth. Tell the truth. Go forth with the rest of your day and tell all the lies you want. 

Seems simple, except it’s not. Because telling some people to tell the truth even once can be like telling them the easiest way to get to the other side of the street is straight ahead. Seems sensible and obvious, but instead they will dig tunnels. And if that doesn’t work, they will build wings and flap their arms. They will scour every map they can find in search of an alternate route, even if that route takes them around the world. They will do anything to avoid simply walking straight ahead, because the crooked route avoids things they would rather not see. 

That is where we find ourselves today in America; we walk the crooked path. Because a more direct route might force us to accept the fact that maybe we really aren’t America the Beautiful. Maybe we are something else entirely. Maybe it’s time to stop saying, “…this is not who we are,” as President Joe Biden (President Barack Obama, too) used to be so fond of saying whenever addressing some glaring form of American ugliness or perversity.  

Because it is. 

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Earlier this year, two young Black men became the most recent victims of an embedded culture of police brutality that clearly does not value Black life. One was tased to death by a group of white police officers in Los Angeles after he flagged them down for assistance after a traffic accident. The other, whose case has received far more attention, was beaten to death by police in Memphis for virtually no reason at all. Some expressed surprise that all five of the officers who beat Tyre Nichols to death were Black. Why would five Black police officers, sworn to protect and serve, kill another Black man, essentially for sport? 

Because Black lives are expendable in America, and they always have been. Oftentimes, we don’t even value ourselves as much as we value others. Self-hatred among Black people is a real thing, and that self-hatred is born from racism.  

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Another uncomfortable truth is that the United States of America in which we live could not even exist without racism. Because the engine of America’s powerful economy was built with cotton, which was provided by free slave labor.

And free slave labor is the most glaring example of the American racism upon which this country was built because that labor could not have been provided for free if the lives of those enslaved Africans had been properly valued.

And we, as the descendants of those enslaved Africans, continue to be devalued in the same way, all these hundreds of years later. Slavery may be over, but the hateful mentality that led to the abduction of our ancestors, the mentality that says, “My white skin is worth more than yours,” is alive and well. It guides our steps. 

We walk the crooked path. 

Keith A. Owens is a local writer and co-founder of Detroit Stories Quarterly and the We Are Speaking Substack newsletter and podcast.