Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives by Gary Younge

hearing me.”
    More than two years after Kenneth was shot, police arrested nine suspected gang members belonging to the “Get Money Gang,” who they claimed had “terrorized” Butler-Tarkington, a north-side neighborhood, while trafficking drugs and guns through the city. They seized 17 guns, almost 6 grams of cocaine, 26 pounds of marijuana, and more than $32,000 in cash. Police believe the group was connected to four homicides in the neighborhood and beyond, dating back to 2012, as well the fatal shooting of a 10-year-old boy, courtesy of a stray bullet.
    Two people they had arrest warrants for in relation to the gang, but failed to catch in the raids, were Jaylen Grice and Tarell Davis—two of the three passengers riding in the car with Kenneth the night he died. The neighborhood they are accused of terrorizing is just fifteen minutes from where Kenneth was shot. His Twitter feed is peppered with references to GMG—Get Money Gang. 21
    Whether it’s guns, death, or themselves Kenneth doesn’t take seriously is not clear—it’s only Twitter. We don’t know if he had anything to do with GMG, if his friends were guilty, if he ever touched a gun, if he was carrying a gun the night he died, or if he ever did anything more criminal than failing to come to a full stop at a stop sign with marijuana residue allegedly in his pipe. Young men like to strut, preen, and bluster, and a platform such as Twitter makes that easy. But one can’t simply dismiss it all as venting on social media. Because both Kenneth and those he mentioned really are dead. The day he was buried @QueenofPetty apologized on Twitter for not attending his funeral. She’d had enough: “srry I couldnt see you get buried today. I can’t go to anymore funerals its heartbreaking. See you in Heaven soon R.I.P.”
    A few days shy of his twentieth birthday, Kenneth was no more an adult than the average college sophomore, but no one was going to describe him as an “innocent,” “angelic,” or “babe.” The elevation and canonizationof the “worthy victim” has a significant bearing on why so many of those most affected by gun violence—the black, brown, and poor—do not align themselves with the gun control movement. “Sometimes, in the past, that has held organizations back,” Julia Browder Eichorn, who has been a gun control campaigner since the nineties, told me. Julia, who is African American and lives in Columbus, Ohio, was in Indianapolis to protest the NRA. I’d met her at Ohio State University by chance a few weeks earlier when I’d been in Columbus to deliver a talk. “To put someone out there who has had less than a stellar lifestyle—the opposition is going to tear that apart. They’re already calling our children, who’ve done nothing, thugs. That’s a huge piece of why you don’t see more moms of color in this movement. Maybe they knew their kids were doing these things, and they didn’t stop them. Maybe they just prayed nothing would happen to them. We have to stand with that mom who maybe didn’t make the best choice, or maybe she made the best choice that she could, but sadly her kid’s not here anymore.”
    Many of the kids who would die in the next twenty-four hours were raised in tough circumstances and had messy lives. But so long as the gun narrative stops at protecting “innocents” and “babes,” it’s difficult to see who will ever speak out for them. “The children who are dying are real kids,” said Clementine Barfield, who set up Save Our Sons and Daughters after her two sons were shot (one survived, one died) in Detroit in the same incident. She was speaking with Deborah Prothrow-Stith, former Commissioner of Public Health for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. “They are real kids from real families. Some were doing foolish things. And some were just caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But all kids have the right to make mistakes. All kids have the right to live. My child is dead. Your