The New Yorker Looks to Antwon Rose's Poetry for Answers

At the New Yorker, A. T. McWilliams discusses a poem written in 2016 by then-15-year-old Antwon Rose, who, at 17, became "the four hundred and ninety-first person killed by police in 2018" and an icon to activists protesting police brutality. McWilliams notes the significance of the poem that Rose left behind, explaining, "In America, when a police-involved killing is caught on camera, the ensuing news coverage often omits a key voice─that of the victim." From there: 

But, two days after the Pittsburgh-area police officer Michael Rosfeld fatally shot Antwon Rose, an unarmed seventeen-year-old black high-school senior from Rankin, Pennsylvania, hundreds of protestors, family, friends, and community members gathered on the street for a memorial and stood in silence to hear Antwon speak from beyond the grave. At the memorial, an activist took the stage to recite a poem, “i am not what you think!,” that Antwon wrote during his tenth-grade honors English class, when he was just fifteen─old enough to understand the dangers of the world, but too young to face them alone. Rosfeld, who shot Antwon three times as he was fleeing a traffic stop, now faces a homicide charge.

The reason Antwon ran from Rosfeld is perhaps best explained by the first line of his poem: “I am confused and afraid.” In the line that follows, Antwon acknowledges the limitations of his fate and that of many young black men in America. “I wonder what path I will take. I hear there’s only two ways out,” he wrote. Those “two ways” are the well-known expectations that many Americans have for young black men: death or incarceration. There was an audible gasp from the crowd when the activist recited the final lines of the first stanza: “I see mothers bury their sons / I want my mom to never feel that pain / I am confused and afraid.” Several days after the memorial, Antwon’s mother, Michelle Kenney, buried her son.

Continue reading at the New Yorker.