The night my family lost a loved one, we were still catching our breath in the shock of grief when the emails came. Newsrooms sent polished condolences followed immediately by requests: legacy statements, a quick quote before 3 p.m., just a few minutes on camera. They asked for access, not truth. They wanted our pain on deadline.
This is not new. Black death in America has always been more than tragedy — it has been commodified. From the auction block to lynching postcards to today’s evening news, our grief has been packaged, sold, and consumed for the public’s gaze.
What we endured is part of a wider pattern. In North Carolina, and across this country, local media have long aided and abetted anti-Black violence. Rarely does the harm come as an outright lie. More often, it hides in omission, distortion, and the unquestioned repetition of police statements. Mugshots take the place of family photos. “Officer-involved shooting” replaces murder. Our communities are flattened into crime beats while the realities of systemic neglect — housing discrimination, underfunded schools, over-policing — remain unspoken.
These editorial choices are not neutral. They decide how the public sees us. They influence whether policymakers respond with resources or repression. They determine whether justice is pursued or denied. Each unchallenged police quote, each sensational headline, each clipped soundbite is another wound added to our grief.
Journalism without accountability is not journalism. It is complicity. Journalism without truth is still violence.
And let me be clear: the harm is not just intellectual. It is emotional, spiritual, and communal. It feels like being stripped bare in public. It feels like having your humanity translated into clicks and ratings while your tears are still fresh. It feels like being re-traumatized by institutions that insist they are simply “doing their jobs.”
As an abolitionist, I know liberation requires more than dismantling prisons and police. It requires dismantling the media structures that uphold them. The same system that profits from incarceration profits from sensational headlines. The same logic that cages our bodies cages our stories.
So I am demanding more. Our grief cannot be reduced to ninety-second news packages. Our pain cannot be mined for ratings. Our voices cannot be clipped into soundbites that fit neatly between commercial breaks.
What would it look like instead? It would look like journalists practicing consent — asking whether families want coverage at all. It would look like publicly correcting misinformation, not burying retractions in fine print. It would look like refusing to copy-paste police press releases. It would look like investing in Black journalists, editors, and community storytellers who understand what is at stake. It would look like slowing down — valuing accuracy and humanity over speed.
It would look like telling the whole story of our lives, not just the spectacle of our deaths.
Our loved one’s life was a light. That light will not be extinguished by violence, nor will it be dimmed by the distortions of institutions that profit from our pain. Her legacy lives in the brilliance of the children she taught, the community she lifted, and the freedom struggle she compels us to continue.
We grieve as resistance. And in that resistance, we are building something freer, more truthful, and more liberatory than this state has ever dared to imagine. Because we deserve more than survival. We deserve a media that tells the truth of our wholeness — not just our wounds, not just our deaths.