The Politics Of Selective Mourning: Why Black Indifference Is Truth, Not Cruelty
WHEN George Wallace was shot in 1972, America performed a curious ritual. The same segregationist governor who once stood in a schoolhouse door vowing “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” suddenly became a figure of pity. Paralyzed from the waist down, he lived the rest of his life in a wheelchair. And in that frailty, the nation draped him in compassion. His past cruelties seemed almost erased by the image of his broken body. Wallace himself later sought forgiveness from Black clergy, asking to be absolved of the violence his career had inflicted. Some extended that forgiveness. Many did not. But the striking thing was not Wallace’s repentance—it was how swiftly the American imagination transformed him into a tragic victim, a man scarred by the very violence he had long encouraged. Sympathy flowed where condemnation once stood.
Yesterday, America performed the same ritual again. Charlie Kirk, 31, was shot dead at a Turning Point USA event in Utah. Within hours, his face filled television screens, framed by glowing tributes. Politicians across the spectrum urged Americans to “tone down the rhetoric.” News anchors described him as a casualty of a divided nation. His humanity was suddenly sacrosanct, replayed, broadcast, and sanctified. But the question I cannot escape—the one Baldwin would surely have asked—is this: why is America always so quick to humanize the men who spent their lives dehumanizing others?
Kirk’s career was nothing short of a sustained assault on Black dignity. He belittled Ketanji Brown Jackson as an affirmative action hire. He sneered at the idea of Black pilots, suggesting they were unfit to land planes. He trafficked daily in the insinuation that Black people were intellectually inferior, undeserving of equal place in American life. These were not harmless jests. They carried weight. They shaped perceptions. They justified exclusion. They prepared the ground for action. Tens of thousands of Black women have already been pushed out of the federal workforce in a purge rationalized by the same suspicion Kirk championed—that Black professionals are fraudulent beneficiaries of “diversity hires.” That loss of income, security, and future is not abstract harm. It is violence rendered through bureaucracy.
And yet, where was the bipartisan handwringing then? When Kirk joked—“ironically,” he insisted—that school shootings might be necessary to defend the Second Amendment, there were no solemn calls for restraint. When he poured contempt on Black professionals, there were no national appeals for civility. His rhetoric only became “too hot” when it consumed him. This is the hypocrisy that gnaws at the core of American mourning: the fire that devours Black lives is never deemed too destructive, but the fire that touches a white man instantly becomes a national emergency.
That is why I defend indifference—mine, and that of many Black people—to Kirk’s death. It is not celebration. It is not cruelty. It is honesty. To mourn him would be to lie, to pretend that the man who denied our humanity somehow deserves our tears. Baldwin warned us of America’s great lie: the lie of innocence, the insistence that the nation is good even as it destroys lives. What we see in Kirk’s sanctification is that lie in motion. Death baptizes him as tragic. His cruelty is washed away in the flood of sympathy. But I remember his words. I remember their consequences. And I refuse to participate in America’s ritual of false mourning.
The real scandal is not Black indifference. The real scandal is America’s centuries-long indifference to Black death. Where were the state funerals for Emmett Till, for the children lynched in Southern woods? Where were the bipartisan demands for civility after George Floyd’s last breath was squeezed from him in the street, after Breonna Taylor was shot in her bed, after Trayvon Martin’s body was left in the grass? When Black people die, their deaths are interrogated, justified, explained away. When white men die, their deaths are mourned without question. The Black man’s death is always a debate. The white man’s death is always a tragedy.
George Wallace lived long enough to ask for forgiveness. Charlie Kirk did not. Wallace was paralyzed, but still capable of seeking redemption. Kirk was cut down suddenly, leaving no time for transformation. Yet both men, despite their legacies of harm, received a national embrace in death. America mourned them. But America has never mourned us.
This is why my indifference is not a failure of empathy—it is an act of truth-telling. It is a refusal to perform the national lie that every white man, no matter how hostile, deserves my mourning. My tears belong to my people—those who have suffered centuries of violence, neglect, and erasure. Those who died without a headline, without a eulogy, without a state’s compassion. I will not give those tears away to a man who spent his life mocking our dignity.
Charlie Kirk’s death is not my tragedy. My tragedy is the unending cycle of Black death ignored by the nation that now insists I mourn him. Indifference is not cruelty—it is resistance. It is the only honest answer in a country that demands Black grief for our enemies but withholds grief for us. My silence is not hate. It is refusal. It is defiance. It is the clearest truth I can offer. My tears remain where they belong—with my people, and only my people.
