This essay is a winner of Truthout’s 2025 Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize.
From Truthout:
At 15, I took a trip from Florida to Texas to visit a prison. This wasn’t my first dance with the system — I’d seen my uncle in the feds before — but this one cut deeper. This time, I was going to visit my mother.
They locked my mother away for assault and battery of a “peace officer,” a charge that still makes me let out that sharp, hollow laugh, the kind that rises just to keep the tears from falling. Because the truth is, she never assaulted anyone. And in all my years growing up Black in America, I had yet to meet an officer who brought anything resembling peace.
Seven years before that, I’d watched a police officer brutally beat my mother in a doctor’s office in Pantego, Texas. Her crime? Being a Black woman who dared to ask for her medical records. She was walking out of the office when the officer grabbed her like she was nothing, body-slamming her to the ground with a violence that made the walls seem to shake. Then came the blows — one after another, the cold metal of his handcuffs used as a weapon against her skull. I stood there frozen, my childhood shattering as her blood stained the floor. That was the day the system branded us both, marking us as disposable in their vision of American justice. Continue reading >>>
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