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"Lady, Black boys getting killed in the South just ain't news." "And girls," she inserted. "And women and men."
Toni Cade Bambara1
She attempted to capture her fate on social media, but her accounts remained frozen. Efforts to expose the deadly force confronting her soon were thwarted, as she and her five-year-old son became surrounded by Baltimore SWAT.2 The police had been dispatched to her residence in order to serve a bench warrant for her failure to appear in court for a traffic violation. Imagine a world where Special Weapons and Tactics forces are deployed for routine warrants.3 The absurdity of this steeped in Blackness. The twenty-three-year-old Black mother had inherited a world that was haunted by survival tactics shared in faded whispers of mothers in coffles, on the auction block, stolen away in the night, and those separated from their capacities to mother by the imposition of force. This world bleeds the morbid justification for such tactics by questioning her sanity and mothering. This was not her first encounter with the police. Previously, she had recorded with her camera phone a traffic stop, while her son looked on from the backseat. As the police snatched her from the car, her son assumed charge of the camera to capture what was happening to his mother. His innocence was of no concern to the cop, however. He forcefully removed his mother from their car and arrested her. This incident provided the backdrop to the standoff with SWAT and the emotions of anger, terror and the determined will to survive that cast a shadow over that fateful 2016 Black August day.4 Meanwhile, a neighbor overheard her in her willingness to surrender. A barrage of bullets soon rang out, leaving the young mother dead and her son wounded by a shot in the cheek. The cops insisted that she had threatened to shoot to kill. Thus, a child was made to witness the death of his mother and feel the pain of his own attempted murder at the hands of the police. His mother had always taught him that the police "are always against us."5 Her name was Korryn Gaines.
The death of Korryn and the violent assault of her son, Kodi, were...