In Pacific Standard, Ezekiel Kweku writes about preparing to be stopped by the police and how his parents helped guide him to be “alive and black in this world”:
If stopped by the police, I thought to myself, I would set my phone to record audio and put it on the passenger seat. I would send a tweet that I was being stopped and had every intention of complying with the police officer. I would turn on Periscope and livestream the stop, crowdsourcing witnesses. I would text my family and tell them that I was not feeling angry or suicidal, that I was looking forward to seeing them soon. There would not be time to do all of these things, but maybe if I prepared in advance I could pull off one or two of them. What all of these plans had in common were that none of them were meant to secure my safety, but rather to ensure that my death looked suspicious enough to question.
I was figuring out how to enter evidence into the inquiry of my own death.
Get the Longreads Weekly Email