I’m a 20-Year-Old Black Kid Who Covered the Kenosha Uprisings. Here’s What I Learned.
If not me, then who? A 40-year-old White man?
When the video of Jacob Blake getting shot seven times in the back in Kenosha, Wisconsin, reached my timeline, I did what I usually do when Black trauma becomes a matter of mass consumption. I got angry.
I shared a Twitter post and an Instagram story, then deleted both. What made Blake’s shooting different from the last time an unarmed Black man was shot, or the time before? My cycle of grief continued; I tried to distance myself from it all by deactivating all of my social media.
The torched Department of Corrections building was a new sight, but the abandoned super K-Mart lot and empty foreclosed homes could cosplay as any other forgotten Midwestern city.
But the next morning, I woke up to a call from an editor asking me if I wanted to go to Kenosha to cover the subsequent uprisings. After a day of going back and forth with my morals, I agreed. I have a love-hate relationship with journalism. It has forced me to reckon with the inherent commodification of Black pain — my pain — for the “story.” But it has also opened doors to…
