A.G. Gancarski
Sitting at a table in Chamblin’s Uptown across from Jacksonville’s Hemming Park, where a vigil for Sandra Bland will be held Sunday at 6:00 p.m., event organizers Chevara Orrin and Melissa Adams spoke of why Bland’s death in police custody moved them so.
Orrin positioned Bland’s death as another example of the “constant assault on the souls of black folk,” and asserted that part of the reason this vigil and the larger #SayHerName movement have assumed critical mass was because people beyond black women have responded to Bland’s death and demanded action.
“So many people,” Orrin said, are getting involved. Black men, white men, trans men, and white women, all “standing with their black and brown sisters.”
Bland died in a Texas jail on July 13, four days after being pulled over for failing to signal during a lane change. The video of Bland’s arrest has been widely circulated, and has shocked America’s collective conscience.
“Right now I have a different level of fear,” Orrin said, since the mass murder of 9 African-American churchgoers in a Charleston, SC church by white supremacist Dylann Roof.
Orrin, the son of a black father and a Jewish mother, was reminded of growing up in Memphis. A neighbor, “Mr. Jack,” made a habit of sitting on his front porch with a shotgun and making shooting noises when Orrin would walk past his porch.
Orrin has two sons, aged 22 and 27, and she is “constantly worried about them” and the interactions that could happen between them and law enforcement officers prone to profiling.
“Police brutality is not limited to black and brown people,” Orrin said, describing a “looming crisis” on that front.
Though Orrin has never been subject to physical police brutality, decades ago, in Memphis, the activist was arrested one day when taking a lunch break during high school.
Her experience was harrowing. The officers kept telling her how much her mother didn’t love her. How nobody was coming to get her.
She was 16 at the time.
The conversation pivoted to Bland’s reported suicide; Orrin is “skeptical” of the reports, saying that that is just one of many inconsistencies in the police version of events, used to justify a narrative predicated on Bland having been able to avoid what happened “if she’d only done what [law enforcement] asked her to do.”
The conditions being used to justify these narratives, gradually, slowly, are being questioned. For Sunday’s vigil, “white people who a year ago would never have thought” of participating are involved in prominent ways, including individual white men and various official organizations. This strikes Orrin and Adams both as an augury of a larger change, an awakening of consciousness of the impacts of structural racism, as well as the willingness of culturally-privileged white people to stand against it to agitate for necessary change.
On Sunday evening, blacks and whites, straight people and gay people, men and women, will all come together to remember the life of Sandra Bland, a black woman whose death in police custody has been framed as her own fault.
Consider the post-mortem toxicology propaganda, which said that Bland may have somehow been responsible because she had marijuana in her system (which she somehow got in jail, despite the fact that she was reported to be in solitary). Or the contention that she somehow made a noose for herself out of a cheap plastic bag liner. Sandra Bland was a black woman; but Orrin and Adams contend that “this can’t just be an issue for black women.”
If this event, and the diversity of those participating, is any indication, it won’t be.
There will be a singer, a spoken word artist, an interfaith piece, but most of all, an understanding that what happened to Sandra Bland is at once unacceptable yet an extreme example of something that happens, in a variety of less extreme and “newsworthy” ways, every day to people of color in America.
