"I happen to believe justice doesn’t look like an execution 
in the middle of a neighborhood street, 
and it doesn’t sound like an attempt to justify that execution 
by trying and convicting that young man of his own murder. 

Justice doesn’t feel like having to repeatedly explain 
why I am angry, 
why I am tired, 
why I deserve consideration as a human being, 
why I deserve to exist, 
why I deserve to thrive, 
why I deserve to live—

why my life matters.  

Justice doesn’t sound like, 
“You, and everyone who is upset right now, are overreacting.” 
because justice isn’t dictated by what a court says or what the court does. 
If that was the case, the resistance to Slave Laws and Black Codes 
and being relegated to backs of buses and segregated lunch counters 
wouldn’t have amounted to much more than just complaining.

So the belief that this moment right now in America is just people complaining 
about an isolated incident that occurred in the Heartland of America 
is not only misplaced and misguided, 
it’s an absolute misunderstanding of what’s going on, 
and a perfect representation of what the problem is—

and there are too many of us who don’t see it, don’t hear it, don’t feel it, 
and therefore don’t believe it exists. 

But our being sick and tired is not enough, 
apparently, 
to convince you that it’s not just us. 

If we are America, and we are sick and tired, 
then that, alone, should tell you that America is sick…
and tired. 

Yet, somehow you’ve been convinced that that’s just us. 
But you can’t convince me that this is justice. 

Just a year ago 
we sat and watched the familiar scene of a public lynching 
excused by a jury of peers. What appears to be a familiar sentiment in America 
is that black boys equal danger, 
black bodies are disposable, 
black life doesn’t matter, 
and whatever you do to any of us doesn’t matter, 
because at the end of the day it’s just us. 

And just ‘cause he was going to college on Monday, 
or she was intoxicated, 
or he had marijuana in his system,
or never had any trouble with the law, 
or was holding a toy gun, 
or sold loose cigarettes before,
or is a PhD student, 
it doesn’t matter…
We are black,
and you’ve showed us our lives—
whatever they may consist of—don’t matter. 

And after a while some of us may even try to convince ourselves that 
we know better, 
and we do better, 
so we are better, 
and let that give us the gumption 
to talk down on those who express that rage and anger 
in ways that make us hang our heads in shame 
and say the same kinds of things about us that have been said over and over—
“That’s not justice.
That’s not us at all.”

And to them, I say this: 
Sometimes it’s easy to see what we were supposed to see when we look back, 

It’s in the moment when it’s most difficult...
we’re too close to it, now, to know it for what it is.  

I imagine many people seeing young Dr. King and his comrades and thinking them troublemakers— 
idealists, wasting time on changing what’s always been 
with no real tangible idea of what might be instead, 
or hearing Malcolm X and believing armed resistance to be a perpetuation of the plague that ails us.

I envision them trying to explain the concept of different 
and it sounding as foreign as explaining a color never seen before by human eyes. 

Imagine what Blue means to the man who’s born blind. 

History tells us chants and songs, coded language meant to inspire change, is just us. 
Boots on streets and sidewalks, arms locked against police dogs, water hoses, cops in riot gear
fanning flames of fires ignited hundreds of years previous, 
breathing in hell, coughing up tear gas, facing masked assailants funded by tax dollars
and fueled on by the thought, the problem is not them, it’s just us. 

We men and women, responding to right now 
with heavy hearts, hurt feelings and hundreds of years of proof 
that this isn’t what justice looks like, sounds like or feels like 

are simply showing, speaking and expressing 
that same want for change
and that all-American desire 
for Liberty, and Justice 
to be for All."

Some Thoughts [On Just Us]

A.D. Carson