It Is My Right Not to Weep: On (Compelled) National Mourning

I didn’t want to write this piece today: I know I am risking racist/White supremacist vitriol by pushing “post” on this piece.

Then, too, those who know my work well, know that I try to be very considered with my writing, but I’m the Queen of Typos, so I am always very anxious about what I quickly present online.

But today, I can’t remain silent: For three days, I have watched the public, White supremacist bullying towards those who are questioning the rapid valorizing of Charlie Kirk, since his horrific k*lling on Thursday. I have become more alarmed by the hour—sometimes, by the very minute.

Let me be clear: violence is never the answer.

You don’t sh**t somebody in front of their wife and kids. You don’t do that. I don’t care who they are. And I’m not saying that because I’m afraid or trying to project myself as a nice person.

This is what I genuinely believe, because many national heroes of Black communities have been k*lled in public: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and President John F. Kennedy. These were nationally traumatizing events.

I can say with my whole chest that violence is never the answer. Thus, I do not celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk, not in the least. But I did not mourn him, either.

I am not sad. I am not weeping—and it is my right not to weep.

You can’t tell me who to mourn, and you can’t tell me what to remember. And you can’t tell me that mentioning that somebody was mean to my community is forbidden, either. I get to talk about Charlie Kirk’s cruelty towards marginalized groups, and you don’t get to deny my humanity because I am telling the truth. You don’t get to bully me, either.

And why is that?

First, because I’m grown. I’ve been old enough to eat cornbread without choking for quite some time now.

Second, because I have the right to freedom of speech under the First Amendment.

Third, because it is my right as a Black person and a Black woman, who Charlie Kirk demeaned in his First Amendment-protected speech acts. Although I’m not a Queer person or a Trans person, Kirk also demeaned those people as well. I don’t feel like typing out Kirk’s hate speech, so I will simply link you to the Guardian article, which gives the direct quotes. [1]

However, within fewer than 24 hours, there have been celebrities, politicians, and journalists who are praising him—I’m talking to you, Ezra Klein—and then, there are others who are so absolutely terrified to admit that this man weaponized hate speech against the above groups in general that they are trembling on television. [2]

And now, some people are literally losing their jobs, because they have posted on social media about how mean Charlie Kirk was to Black people, women, Queer, and Trans folks. [3] Others are gaslighted online, even though Charlie Kirk’s organization Turning Point USA made it their business to get those professors fired who he deemed troublemakers. [4]

For example, Professor Stacey Patton has posted (much more courageously than I ever could) how Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA—which, shockingly, is a 501(c)(3) Non-profit—listed her on their “Professor Watch.” [5] As a result, Patton received horrible threats as well as misogynist threats of intimate violence—and worse. (I’m not going to like to “Professor Watch and give Turning Point clicks. You can Google yourself, but it’s true.)

However, for some reason, Patton’s viral post did not make national news, unlike the valorizing articles by so-called progressives who now have betrayed Black folks and other marginalized individuals. Again, I’m talking to you, Ezra Klein.

And yet, despite Black women/Black people being targeted and demonized, African Americans are being told that we can’t talk about what Kirk said about us--and if we say we aren’t sad that Kirk died, if we logically explain why, we have been threatened.

Black folks are literally being compelled to celebrate somebody who made us the targets of White supremacist oppression and used his platform to make our lives miserable.

Naturally, as a student of history, I have turned to the past for understanding—and as someone who communes with God and the ancestors, I woke up this morning asking them, what historical lessons connect to this current moment?

And what instantly popped into my mind seconds after asking that question was the debate over the WPA Slave Narratives, and what it meant for the national memory of slavery. The WPA Slave Narratives are known to those of us who study slavery: From 1936 to 1938, interviewers from the Works Projects Administration under President Franklin D. Roosevelt conducted interviews with more than 2000 formerly enslaved African Americans. [6] In the narratives, there were inconsistencies between different sets of interviews, such as some being presented in “Negro dialect”—what somebody assumed was the Black vernacular—and others being “cleaned up” and presented in the “standard dialect.”

And why were there inconsistencies with presenting the speech of formerly enslaved African Americans? Because most of the interviewers of these formerly enslaved folks were White. More than that, though, there is evidence that there was what scholar Ellen Hampton called “manipulative editing” of the interviews of these formerly enslaved folks, concerning what they remembered about slavery and about the White people who enslaved them. [7] According to Hampton:

“Much of the editing of the Mississippi [WPA] interviews was done to bring the narratives in line with Lost Cause ideology portraying slavery as a benign institution spoiled by a few ‘poor quality folks,’ terminology for cruel or particularly heinous slaveowners. These tainted narratives have then been picked up by historians who believed they had original material and have been used in major works about American slavery, from Eugene Genovese’s Roll Jordan Roll to Leon Litwack’s Been in the Storm Too Long.”

I don’t have enough space here to deep dive into a lengthy discussion of the Lost Cause ideology of the Confederacy, so here is the reputable source of Encyclopedia Virginia that gives you a summary. [8] Suffice to say, however, that Jillian Michaels and other White supremacists have resurrected this nonsense—which, if you live in the South, Lost Cause ideology is like one of them zombies from “The Walking Dead”—and are trotting it around.

Think about it.

These White interviewers with the United States government were interviewing elderly Black folks living in the south—and interviewing in these elderly folks’ homes (and probably were offered refreshments, because that’s how old Black folks do, even today.) Many of these elderly African Americans were still living on the land where they had been enslaved. Still, they were courageous enough to tell the truth—not “their” truth, but the truth—and many (though, it must be fair, not all) of these White interviewers had the audacity and cruelty to alter the truth about slavery, because they refused to believe when Black folks told them that slavery had been very bad.

This is what White supremacists do.

They attempt to alter historical memory, and not only the memories of other White people, but also those of non-White people that they have harmed. And they do it in real time, simultaneously using media, their bully pulpit, and threats of violence.

By the way, you don’t need fictitious depictions such as Orwell’s 1984 or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as examples of historical erasure of collective memory, because it has happened in real life. And I’m getting really annoyed at people constantly bringing up the latter novel, as if African American women didn’t live in actual reproductive slavery for 339 years, but for some reason, only when White women are in potential danger in Atwoods’s novel (or television series) does it become a “real thing.” And why is that? I’ll let you think on that.

White supremacists hop up in Black folks’ heads and tell us we aren’t smart or pretty or sane or logical enough to remember what actually happened. They threaten our jobs and even get us evicted if we won’t remember history—even if that history happened only days or weeks ago— like they have ordered us to—this is what happened to Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer.

And worst, when White supremacists use their power—like their money, or political placement—to compel an alteration of memory by threatening violence, by turning their White supremacist-sponsored mobs against us.

And then, White supremacists tell us, they have threatened us with destruction because they are kind, good, human beings, and we are not.

If we get fired? That’s our fault. If somebody spits in our faces—rhetorically or physically—that’s our fault. If we get lynched by a mob? That’s our fault. If we get evicted from our rented homes, that’s our fault. If we get taken into slavery, forced across shark-infested waters, and forced for centuries to work somebody else’s lands for no money or reparations, while under the threat of our families’ rupture by the auction block? Yes, somehow, that’s still our fault.

What kind of sense does any of this make?

As my late mother used to say, “Honorée, that makes nonsense.”

This morning, what God and my ancestors told me is that it is Sunday. It is the Lord’s Day, and though I am a radical Black feminist, I remain a Christian, which means I follow a man who refused to bend to power. In this year, truth is all I have—it’s all we have.

You can’t make us mourn, and you can’t take the truth from us. As my southern Black folks would say, we been knew the truth. You can’t take our memories, either. We know what happened, and so do our ancestors, and so will our children and their children, and so it ever will be.

Notes

A note about my notes: I’ve decided to start including not only links but also end notes for my pieces. But I’ve entirely forgotten Chicago Manual of Style, so don’t be complaining that my endnotes are in an incorrect format. The information is there, and I’m doing the best I can right now, as I’m trying to finish another book of fiction.

[1] Chris Stein, “Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy.” September 11, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk-quotes-beliefs

[2] Ezra Klein, “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” September 11, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/opinion/charlie-kirk-assassination-fear-politics.html

[3] Huo Jingnan, Jude Joffe-Block, Audrey Nguyen. “People Are Losing Jobs Due to Social Media Posts About Charlie Kirk.” https://www.opb.org/article/2025/09/13/charlie-kirk-critics-are-being-targeted-online-and-losing-jobs/

[4] Vincent Rupena, “Turning Point USA's professor watchlist sparks fear for Chico State Professor.” September 14, 2025. https://krcrtv.com/news/local/turning-point-usas-professor-watchlist-sparks-fear-and-controversy

[5] “Journalist put on Charlie Kirk’s ‘hit list’ speaks out about vile abuse: ‘He normalised violence.’” September 12, 2025. https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/09/12/charlie-kirk-hit-list-stacey-patton/.

[6] Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938. Library of Congress. “A Note on the Language of the Narratives.” https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/note-on-the-language-of-the-narratives/.

[7] Ellen Hampton, “‘Lawdy! I was sho’ happy when I was a slave!’: Manipulative editing in the WPA former-slave narratives from Mississippi,” L’Ordinaire des Amériques. July 11, 2014. http://journals.openedition.org/orda/522/.

[8] Caroline E. Janney. “The Lost Cause: Six Tenets.” https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lost-cause-the/.

[9] “Freedom Summer: Fannie Lou Hamer.” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedomsummer-hamer/