A piece meant to Bring Awareness to the many missing Black Women and Children
Imagine everything that makes you you. Focus on your experiences and the people in your life that have helped you become the person you are today. Think about all those great moments that have left you laughing beyond repair with friends and family and all the memories you have pouring out of Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook. For a second, bask in those memories and hold them close. Understand that they, along with your personality, give you identity and sense of belonging.
Now, imagine that your identity is no longer yours. Your great memories are shackled by fresh experiences of constantly being bound and beaten.Your personality traits are muted by fear, anxiety, numbness, and depression. Your visions of friends and family are blurred by the frequent rush of drugs in your system. You days are no longer consistent. You are passed through men regularly and transported to several different locations for others entertainment. You are a puppet labeled with the title of "bitch" and "whore", and your strings are pulled by many. As you watch new girls enter into these circumstances, you pray, scream, and beg for this trauma to cease. But every day is layered with another element of pain. To hold onto a glimpse of hope, you close your eyes and envision what you believe to be your family searching for you. You become enamored with the idea of being held in their arms once again, and for a short moment, you have peace. It is in this moment that you can see a positive ending.
But this positive ending never arrives. Days, weeks, months, and years go by, and the hope you once had of rescue is incinerated by the harsh reality that no one is coming. You can only see one way out of this situation, so you take it....
Upon your death, you are able to get a glimpse of your family’s efforts in finding you. There were flyers and social media posts, but that’s it. No police report. No search party. No news coverage. You begin to weep and wonder why this is so. To gain clarity, you are shown the truth.
Your parent(s) went to the police on several occasions, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. Their need was constantly dismissed by “maybe she just ran away” and “we’ll look into it” statements. They fought to get your story told on the news, but it just wasn’t important enough. Flyers and social media posts were all they had. Days, weeks, months, and years went by, and as more Black women and children went missing, your family’s social media posts became harder to locate. You were just another girl gone.
It is in this moment you realize that death truly was your only option. There was never going to be a happy ending because your disappearance was deemed irrelevant by the people who should’ve cared more. You were labelled dead long before death actually consumed you.
Your heart aches but no longer from your pain. It feels agony for the many many Black women and children who are continuously praying for an end result that will never come.
As you watch my piece, keep that story in mind. While it was simply in your imagination, this, unfortunately, is a lot girls reality. There are 64,000 Black women and children missing, and it's time that WE paid attention.
Thank you to my phenomenal dancers Kris, Claire, Raleigh, Julianna, Mollie, Mackenna. You all embodied this story and my vision beautifully. I truly appreciate you all for helping me bring this serious issue to light. I am forever grateful.