by Amanda Murphy
I am only allowed 750 words
To tell you about my state
And all the things I wish I could do
To make it better
I wish I could tell you
About every last statue
In our state house
That manages to perpetuate
The long-standing history
Of white supremacy in our state
While we deny its existence
Such as
Statues of Andrew Pickens, Thomas Sumter, and Francis Marion
All of whom owned slaves
In a state whose population
Is ⅕ African descent
These men who fought to steal land
From the Indigenous Americans
That we name our cities after
And whose statues were all commissioned
By white supremacist groups
80 years after the last of them were buried
And don’t get me started
On the Father of Modern Gynecology
Whose monument stands proud
In our great Columbia
For his contributions to women’s health
White women’s health, that is
Because to this day in 2021
You can hear the cries
Of Black mothers
Whose newborn babies
Are three times more likely
To grow up without a mother
As stated by our own MUSC Health statistics
And that is if they themselves do not perish
Before taking their first steps
Because they too
Stand twice the risk of death
As they are birthed
Than White babies in our state
According to South Carolina DHEC
More than ¾ of our state is Christian (Pew Research Center)
And God says that hate
Is the worst sin of them all
Yet in 2015,
Our statehouse was the venue
Of a Ku Klux Klan rally
And not only that
But a month prior
I witnessed my first terrorist attack
Not the kind that makes a twelve-year-old
Take their shoes off in a Charleston airport
But the kind that kills nine fellow Christians
The kind that brings the reality of death
Onto an eleven-year-old girl
But two months before that,
Walter Scott was killed
By a man who was meant to protect me
Who was meant to protect my friends
Including every single one of them
Who suddenly had to have a talk
About what it meant to be a Black American
Children who were no older than I
Who suddenly knew why
A broken tail light
Was deadly
I can remember
When one of those same friends
Got a DNA test for his birthday
And asked me, his nerdy best friend,
Why there were children at our school
Who would call him cruel words
For his dark skin
When he was almost ¼ white
(3 percent more than the average African American
according to Ancestry.com,
23 and Me,
and Family Tree DNA.com)
Tell me why
In this state
I was the one who had to inform
One of my best friends
Of a new breed of cruelty
One that is not taught in our schools
That ¼ of his blood
Was descent of white men
Who saw no issue
With raping a human being
Who they considered no more than property
Because nobody teaches Black history for what it is
To be fair, they don’t teach many life skills at all
In fact, in the Centers for Disease Control’s report
On South Carolina Sex Ed,
They documented that there are no requirements
For how much knowledge the teachers have
On sexual health
For Medical Accuracy
Or for HIV prevention
But who could really be surprised about that last bit?
When even national news, NBC to be exact,
Reports on the 4 trans women who have died
In South Carolina
In just two years
Two of whom died two weeks from each other
And even though we vowed to find their killers
We still had to wait for Congress to outlaw trans panic
So even if we had found them,
It wouldn’t have mattered
Because in 2007,
Stephen Andrew Moller
Pleaded gay panic
After shattering the facial bones
Of Sean Kennedy
And hitting him so hard,
So many times, that his brain
Was detached from his brain stem
And then, to quote the Wikipedia article on his death,
Completely verbatim, it began “ricocheting in his skull”
Yet Mr. Moller received only two and a half years
For the brutal killing of a man
That would have earned him 30-life in the state of South Carolina
Had his victim been straight
And don’t get me wrong,
I am capable of pointing out its flaws
But I do love this state
And I know
That it deserves better,
That I,
That we,
Deserve Better
And this is number 750