I think we are all, if we weren’t before, now familiar with the phrase “no justice, no peace.” It’s a phrase borne from the tension and pain springing from the same grounds as the Black Lives Matter movement; that something is amiss when black, unarmed males are being killed at embarrassingly disproportionate rates to unarmed whites, and the black community is ravished by internal conflict and external pressure.

From the outside looking in at the black community, especially here in West Virginia, things seem hopelessly behind. I asked a good friend of mine what it’s like to be black here in West Virginia, in such a “white” place. He honestly and frankly said it was awful. Often, he said, the jokes are never-ending, and it comes from a place of total misunderstanding. What most of us understand as just an occasion for jokes, like a peculiar voice or laugh or habit, is really an essential part of one’s identity experience. All that is to say that there is some serious misunderstanding as to what “the other side” lives with.

Since then, I’ve been trying to gain as much understanding myself as possible about what it means, feels like, and what it is in this country to be black. I don’t understand everything, and in this life I most likely won’t, but as I’ve been on this journey I’ve been watching the news unfold with everyone else from Michael Brown to Alton Sterling, and some distressing things have come to the surface. That phrase I mentioned earlier is one of them. It’s a saddening statement in all reality because of its potential and power to create and propagate division and destruction under the guise of unity and construction. It harkens slightly back to the days of the original civil rights movement, with reminders of the peaceful acts of civil disobedience of King. But, in reality it is a societal hostage situation we have on our hands. To say, “you will never have peace until we have justice” is to say “you will never get us to change our anger and our sense of revenge until you put aside your anxiety and fear.”

Who is this going to end with is a question worth asking, I feel. It’s a lesson we’re given early, from our childhood; that this must end with you. There will be offenses, there will be actions taken out of hatred, fear, even good intentions gone awfully wrong, but what is regarding criminality as protest, upholding hate and poisonous rhetoric as a way of combating hate and poisonous rhetoric, or repaying evil with evil ever going to achieve? I think it’s fair to wonder exactly where this escalation is going to go, if whether or not this most recent assault on police officers wasn’t somehow born from that spirit of “you first.” Perhaps, in some small way, it’s just as true that it’s “no peace, no justice?”