How the death of a child at the hands of some hired to protect and serve could ever be deemed justifiable just makes me sick. There has to be a better way to serve our communities than this. Why would we use lethal force for a misdemeanor? Certainly there was an ample evidence to follow up without creating a danger to others in the community than brandishing firearms. Where were the community outreach programs that could have helped this mother? Why haven’t the parents lawyer even seen the police footage. Why was the shooter allowed to resign and fade into the background. This doesn’t appear to be an example of public safety any community should accept. We can and must do better for the people!
Eddie, reading this, I kept hearing Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam”, written after Medgar Evers was murdered and four girls were killed in a Birmingham church. You write that in Mississippi we sing the blues about it all. Simone wouldn’t. She introduced her song as a show tune for a show that hadn’t been written yet, and set her fury to a bright, jaunty tempo. Mississippi gives the song its name, but it is America she is addressing. Your essay brings me back to that same recognition: the country cannot place its sins in Mississippi and imagine itself innocent elsewhere.
Baldwin knew what that kind of innocence costs. In the letter to his nephew that opens The Fire Next Time, he writes that “it is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” I kept turning that over as I read about Kohen. Here was a child of one year old, as innocent as anyone can be, and the innocence the country rushed to protect was its own.
In my writing about Steel Pulse and black life in Britain, I keep coming back to how precarious black belonging remains. You can live in a country, work in it, raise your children there, and still find its protection uncertain. Fanon saw this in The Wretched of the Earth, where the colonised meet the state first through the policeman and the soldier. Those of us whose families came out of empire know that encounter well. What shakes me about Kohen is how early it began for him. You write that you survived Mississippi. Kohen was never given the chance to try.
And I find myself asking: had this been a white mother with her white baby in the car, would the same sequence of decisions have unfolded? Would the shooting have been declared justified so readily, and would the declaration have been accepted? Would her alleged wrongdoing have taken up so much of the space where we should be mourning her child? The allegation has not been proven. Even if it were true, what could it possibly settle about the value of that baby’s life?
It would be easy to conclude from all this that black lives don’t matter. But Kohen’s life mattered completely. What failed him was a system prepared to act as though it didn’t, and then call that justice. That’s why people had to say “Black lives matter” in the first place, and why they still have to.
Mbembe’s account of necropolitics names what lies beneath this: the power to decide whose lives may be exposed to death without consequence. A finding that a baby’s killing was justified exercises that power quietly, through an official statement. It tells his family, before their grief has even settled, that they must now persuade the country something intolerable has happened.
Simone’s anger still reaches us because we are still being asked to live with what produced it. Kohen should have had a lifetime ahead of him. His mother should be holding him.
The first thing I said to my husband when I heard this story was a baby is dead because mom needed diapers and couldn’t afford them. She took diapers!! Really!! This regime has made it impossible for people in need to survive. Stripping all services that might help. It’s just all too much. Thank you Eddie for all you do and for bringing attention to all the injustices. I don’t know how you do it day after day but I appreciate you.
It is true. This is how it’s been and how it is now. And Eddie, I’m hearing many others, ( including myself) saying likewise: that until we reckon with our original sins of genocide and slavery, we’re not moving forward in any kind of way.
Can we make our voices heard to the AG of Mississippi? We can try.
when people refer to reagans "shining city on the hill" , i often think of cicero's words from ancient rome -
"As to our friend Cato , I have as warm a regard for him as you. But the fact remains that with all his patriotism and integrity he is sometimes a political liability. He speaks in the Senate as though he were living in Plato’s Republic rather than Romulus’s shit hole. " -Cicero, letter to Atticus
"... As for our friend Cato, I have as warm a regard for him as you. The fact remains that with all his patriotism and integrity he is sometimes a political liability. He speaks in the Senate as though he were living in Plato’s Republic instead of Romulus’ cesspool..."
America: "A place that can accept a cop killing a one-year-old Black child over some damn diapers and baby clothes." It's who we are. It's who we've always been. Cruel. Violent. Hypocrites. It's who we'll be no matter who gets elected. Unless we can face it and root it out, somehow atone....
I know this is not the same but points to how normal racism has been in this country. I grew up in a south suburb of Chicago born in 1955. Park Forest was, on the surface, a idilc place for boomer kids to be raised. Upon moving to DC, I went to the American History Museum Transportation section which has a display of Park Forest as a model of the time post the G.I. Bill (correct me if I’m wrong but Blacks were excluded from). The Charter that established Park Forest had a section called ‘the problem of the negro’. Luckily I had a father who was active in the South Chicago civil rights movement who schooled me, beyond the consensus trance, what White privilege was/is now. Reading those words about Park Forest, that baby being killed over the cost of diapers, unaffordable to many moms given our tragic socioeconomic system forever punishing Blacks, is infuriating. In some ways the insidiousness of unspoken racism like from my childhood has a worse
Sorry for the incomplete share…is worse than the racism in Mississippi because it lives underground and doesn’t need to reconciled by Whites. Eddie thank you for all the learning and dot connecting how we are herein 2026.
Amen and ase--America was developed from a European cash grab driven by violence, enslavement, rape, and colonization that was able to "clean itself" through the mythologizing of whiteness as a divine right to rule. It's much like how NASCAR was birthed from bootlegging (crime and racism) and has been able to "clean itself" through the mythologizing of its past. Sure, there are some appealing things about NASCAR, but it has never divorced itself from its Confederate roots and clings forthrightly to those roots, much like America.
A great and heartfelt painful truth about White America. I cry and mourn for all of the mothers and families that have gone through this tragedy and abuse of power. My dad is from Mississippi too and rarely speaks about when he resided there as a child. I see why. Thank you for sharing this.
How the death of a child at the hands of some hired to protect and serve could ever be deemed justifiable just makes me sick. There has to be a better way to serve our communities than this. Why would we use lethal force for a misdemeanor? Certainly there was an ample evidence to follow up without creating a danger to others in the community than brandishing firearms. Where were the community outreach programs that could have helped this mother? Why haven’t the parents lawyer even seen the police footage. Why was the shooter allowed to resign and fade into the background. This doesn’t appear to be an example of public safety any community should accept. We can and must do better for the people!
Eddie, reading this, I kept hearing Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam”, written after Medgar Evers was murdered and four girls were killed in a Birmingham church. You write that in Mississippi we sing the blues about it all. Simone wouldn’t. She introduced her song as a show tune for a show that hadn’t been written yet, and set her fury to a bright, jaunty tempo. Mississippi gives the song its name, but it is America she is addressing. Your essay brings me back to that same recognition: the country cannot place its sins in Mississippi and imagine itself innocent elsewhere.
Baldwin knew what that kind of innocence costs. In the letter to his nephew that opens The Fire Next Time, he writes that “it is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” I kept turning that over as I read about Kohen. Here was a child of one year old, as innocent as anyone can be, and the innocence the country rushed to protect was its own.
In my writing about Steel Pulse and black life in Britain, I keep coming back to how precarious black belonging remains. You can live in a country, work in it, raise your children there, and still find its protection uncertain. Fanon saw this in The Wretched of the Earth, where the colonised meet the state first through the policeman and the soldier. Those of us whose families came out of empire know that encounter well. What shakes me about Kohen is how early it began for him. You write that you survived Mississippi. Kohen was never given the chance to try.
And I find myself asking: had this been a white mother with her white baby in the car, would the same sequence of decisions have unfolded? Would the shooting have been declared justified so readily, and would the declaration have been accepted? Would her alleged wrongdoing have taken up so much of the space where we should be mourning her child? The allegation has not been proven. Even if it were true, what could it possibly settle about the value of that baby’s life?
It would be easy to conclude from all this that black lives don’t matter. But Kohen’s life mattered completely. What failed him was a system prepared to act as though it didn’t, and then call that justice. That’s why people had to say “Black lives matter” in the first place, and why they still have to.
Mbembe’s account of necropolitics names what lies beneath this: the power to decide whose lives may be exposed to death without consequence. A finding that a baby’s killing was justified exercises that power quietly, through an official statement. It tells his family, before their grief has even settled, that they must now persuade the country something intolerable has happened.
Simone’s anger still reaches us because we are still being asked to live with what produced it. Kohen should have had a lifetime ahead of him. His mother should be holding him.
The first thing I said to my husband when I heard this story was a baby is dead because mom needed diapers and couldn’t afford them. She took diapers!! Really!! This regime has made it impossible for people in need to survive. Stripping all services that might help. It’s just all too much. Thank you Eddie for all you do and for bringing attention to all the injustices. I don’t know how you do it day after day but I appreciate you.
It is true. This is how it’s been and how it is now. And Eddie, I’m hearing many others, ( including myself) saying likewise: that until we reckon with our original sins of genocide and slavery, we’re not moving forward in any kind of way.
Can we make our voices heard to the AG of Mississippi? We can try.
when people refer to reagans "shining city on the hill" , i often think of cicero's words from ancient rome -
"As to our friend Cato , I have as warm a regard for him as you. But the fact remains that with all his patriotism and integrity he is sometimes a political liability. He speaks in the Senate as though he were living in Plato’s Republic rather than Romulus’s shit hole. " -Cicero, letter to Atticus
From Cicero's "Letter to Atticus":
"... As for our friend Cato, I have as warm a regard for him as you. The fact remains that with all his patriotism and integrity he is sometimes a political liability. He speaks in the Senate as though he were living in Plato’s Republic instead of Romulus’ cesspool..."
https://www.loebclassics.com/display/marcus_tullius_cicero-letters_atticus/1999/pb_LCL007.133.xml?readMode=recto
America: "A place that can accept a cop killing a one-year-old Black child over some damn diapers and baby clothes." It's who we are. It's who we've always been. Cruel. Violent. Hypocrites. It's who we'll be no matter who gets elected. Unless we can face it and root it out, somehow atone....
I know this is not the same but points to how normal racism has been in this country. I grew up in a south suburb of Chicago born in 1955. Park Forest was, on the surface, a idilc place for boomer kids to be raised. Upon moving to DC, I went to the American History Museum Transportation section which has a display of Park Forest as a model of the time post the G.I. Bill (correct me if I’m wrong but Blacks were excluded from). The Charter that established Park Forest had a section called ‘the problem of the negro’. Luckily I had a father who was active in the South Chicago civil rights movement who schooled me, beyond the consensus trance, what White privilege was/is now. Reading those words about Park Forest, that baby being killed over the cost of diapers, unaffordable to many moms given our tragic socioeconomic system forever punishing Blacks, is infuriating. In some ways the insidiousness of unspoken racism like from my childhood has a worse
Sorry for the incomplete share…is worse than the racism in Mississippi because it lives underground and doesn’t need to reconciled by Whites. Eddie thank you for all the learning and dot connecting how we are herein 2026.
Amen and ase--America was developed from a European cash grab driven by violence, enslavement, rape, and colonization that was able to "clean itself" through the mythologizing of whiteness as a divine right to rule. It's much like how NASCAR was birthed from bootlegging (crime and racism) and has been able to "clean itself" through the mythologizing of its past. Sure, there are some appealing things about NASCAR, but it has never divorced itself from its Confederate roots and clings forthrightly to those roots, much like America.
A great and heartfelt painful truth about White America. I cry and mourn for all of the mothers and families that have gone through this tragedy and abuse of power. My dad is from Mississippi too and rarely speaks about when he resided there as a child. I see why. Thank you for sharing this.