When will Baltimore lives matter?

It happened again this month. A text one night at 11:32: “Sean died today.” Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote an op-ed about the dangers of Baltimore City teachers having hope, given that so many of our kids are killed or lost to prison. Since then, at least four of my former students have died because of guns and gun violence. I have to say “at least” because I know it’s more. I know there are kids I’m forgetting because I’m not keeping a close record. I say “at least” because I remember these four names: Sean. Asia. Damon. Deyquawn.

These deaths are going largely unnoticed on a wider scale because of the violence and unrest connected to the Black Lives Matter movement on the national stage. The recent deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, as well as the violent attacks aimed at police officers in Baton Rouge and Dallas, are consuming most everyone’s attention. Meanwhile, in Baltimore, the numbers and names of young black lives pile up and up, unmarked and unremembered by most outside of their families.

The young men and women I refer to above graduated from high school. They had jobs. They had kids. I remember them mostly as childish teenagers, but when they were cut down, they were young adults with promising futures who weren’t active on the streets. They were victims of circumstance.

I am tired of my students not living to see 30. I am tired of their kids growing up without them. I am tired of the RIP statuses on Facebook, the funerals, the memorial concerts, the tears, the apathy, the crying mothers and grandmothers. Our society is a machine designed to chew up black lives and spit them out.

Earlier this summer, several of my former students organized a memorial concert for my slain student Michael Mayfield, to benefit a project named for him and in celebration of his legacy of peer mediation. I am incredibly proud of them for continuing their friend’s considerable legacy, but I would much rather attend his baseball games and watch him continue to coach the kids of the Westside.

One of my students who was killed this year was 26 years old, proud mother to a 2-year-old daughter, excited to finally marry her daughter’s father. One week before her wedding, she was shot and killed while she was taking out the trash outside her West Baltimore home. She was laid to rest in her wedding dress, and now her family has to explain to her daughter who she was through stories and pictures.

My son is black. He is 13. His life matters. He has to live in this machine. As of Thursday, there were 170 homicides in the city of Baltimore this year; the vast majority of the victims are black males, many of whom are not much older than my son. What am I supposed to tell him?

In a month, we will begin another school year. Once again, the teachers of this city will go to work, looking at dozens of excited faces with fresh notebooks and pencils, ready to start another year. We will put ourselves out there and make ourselves vulnerable by caring about so many fragile young lives. We know that even when they graduate, they aren’t safe.

So many young lives, and the machine keeps on bearing down on them.

We must continue to remind ourselves that their lives matter.

And then, maybe they will.