 And when we speak, we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive. Audre Lorde. When it is the police, we remain silent. When it is rape, we remain silent. When it is someone famous, someone popular, someone powerful, we remain silent. Of all rape victims, we have the right to require silence because we think no one is innocent, not even the innocent, not ever the victims we make them complicit. We are told when we are young who we can go to to feel safe. Tell the police, tell your teacher, tell your preacher. Who do you tell when those charged with your protection, those tasked to give you service, slide their badges over your body, slide their chalk down your throat, get you drunk on the blood of Jesus then tell you that your silence will protect you. The numbers tell me that nothing will protect me or you, like how since 1976, 1,394 people have been executed on death row, but over 14,000 have been murdered by police. Like how sexual misconduct is the second highest form of police brutality, like how you're more likely to get raped by a cop than someone on the street, like how Oklahoma City Police Officer Daniel Holtz-Claw can face over 32 charges of first-degree rape, forcible sodomy and sexual battery and still get freed on bail and still get thousands in donations because him getting punished for raping black women is seen as the real injustice. Like how 51% of all sexual violence committed by police is against minors, like how 60% of black women get raped before they turn 18, like how every woman I know has either been raped or her sister or her mama or her daughter or her friend or her cousin or her coworker has been raped, like how men get raped, but no one ever wants to talk about that because we don't even like to talk about women getting raped, like how children get raped, but no one ever wants to talk about that because we don't even want to talk about anyone getting raped, like how sex is the weapon when it comes to rape, not the actual point because rapists hardly ever come and hardly ever close to justice with thousands of untested rape kits languishing in basements of police stations nationwide. Why? And by talking about rape when I am supposed to be talking about how we can't breathe. This PTSD takes my breath away, takes my days, turns them into tears, takes my joys, turns them into tears, takes and takes and takes and takes my light until I swallow darkness of silence to keep the kind of sanity that makes everyone else more comfortable than I will ever be. I have never been able to breathe. I hold my stomach and unintentionally have held it in for decades trying to hold myself together, held it in so long that it hurts to pee, to sing, to sleep, to speak. Everyone tells me that my silence will protect me. Just like the police are supposed to protect me. Just like the church should be my sanctuary, just like schools and workshops and poetry were supposed to liberate me, but I still can't breathe because the movement ain't trying to get me free. When rape is so pervasive that those trying to uplift the masses do their best to try to uplift some asses then press fingers into screams saying just move with me, not against me saying keep this our secret. No one will believe you anyway. Gluttons for power will always gorge themselves on those they perceive as weak. What is most terrifying to the powerful is the weak realizing their strength. There is no keeping of secrets when the dead are resurrected through the anger of the living. There is no keeping of secrets when the raped find their justice in the telling of what happened. There is no keeping of the secret that the system of America was built between the thighs of captured dark women built inside the grooves of bloody black backs built on top of bones red and feathered with colonizing cruelty when the desecrated begin to assess the damage. Demand what was stolen be returned. Demand what was broken be repaired. Demand what was destroyed be restored. Demand what was betrayed be reconciled by the awful searing truth and the breath will demand its rightful place. The breath will command its rightful space to matter to shatter this silence that will never protect us. We matter, black lives matter and so we must breathe.