Danielle Dixon

“You cast a ballot for a Black man in America while holding a Black baby. Name a dream more American than that, especially with your three felonies serving as beacons to alert anybody of your reckless ambition. That woman beside you is the kind of thing fools don’t even dream about in prison & she lets you hold your boy while voting, as if the voting makes you & him more free.”
― Reginald Dwayne Betts, Felon

“refused the narrative of a brown child, his dignity, his right to breathe, his actual fucking existence, with all the crystalline brilliance I saw when my boys first reached for me. This world best invite more than the story of the children bleeding on crisp fall days. Tamir’s death must be more . . . than warning about recklessness & abandoned justice & white terror’s ghost—& this is why I hate it all, the protests & their counters, the Civil Rights attorneys that stalk the bodies of the murdered, this dance of ours that reduces humanity to the dichotomy of the veil. We are not permitted to articulate the reasons we might yearn to see a man die. A mind may abandon sanity. What if all I had stomach for was blood? But history is no sieve & sanity is no elixir & I am bound to be haunted by the strength that lets Tamir’s father, mother, kinfolk resist the temptation to turn everything they see into a grave & make home the series of cells that so many brothers already call their tomb.”
― Reginald Dwayne Betts, Felon

“not when the accumulation of our yesterdays hang like the last dusk before us— each memory another haunting thing.”
― Reginald Dwayne Betts, Felon

“This is the brick & mortar of the America that murdered Tamir & may stalk the laughter in my backseat. I am a father driving his Black sons to school & the death of a Black boy rides shotgun & this could be a funeral procession. The death a silent thing in the air, unmentioned— because mentioning death invites taboo: if you touch my sons the blood washed away from the concrete must, at some point, belong to you, & not just to you, to the artifice of justice that is draped like a blue g-d around your shoulders, the badge that justifies the echo of the fired pistol; taboo:”
― Reginald Dwayne Betts, Felon