This essay discusses gun violence, the death of a young person, institutional racism, and grief. Please take care of yourself if these topics are tender right now.
One of the most intimate terrors of spending more than twenty years loving Black children through public-sector work is knowing that the world may one day meet them through devastation and mistake that moment for who they were.
The fear lives somewhere between memory and anticipation, surfacing whenever a young person disappears, whenever a neighbourhood begins speaking in lowered voices, or whenever I open my phone and see the name of a place where I once worked beside the word "shooting". It’s the fear that somebody I loved, mentored, advocated for, fed, laughed with, fought for, or watched grow up will become public property before the people who knew them have had space to speak to who they were.
A few days after the shooting at Salsa on St. Clair, I opened Facebook and found a message from a young woman I had worked with more than a decade ago. She told me that one of the young men who had been killed was Cesar.
My Cesar. Our Cesar. The little boy I met when he was seven years old.
