“Can I Get A Witness?” grew out of my outrage and sorrow of seeing the gunned down body of Michael Brown lying in the street on August 9th, 2014. He lived in Ferguson, MO where my grandmother, aunt and cousin also reside. He was shot multiple times by a police officer, murdered in cold blood, disregarded and thrown out as trash, his body laying in the street for hours, an event that deeply and profoundly affected me and so many others. 

 

Seeing tear gas discharged onto American citizens, the beatings, the arrests, the shootings with rubber bullets, the flash bangs, the batons striking and the presence of dogs was a tragedy of massive proportions unseen since the brutality of the Civil Rights era. The people of this community and country marching and speaking out against the murder of its young were brutally punished as unrecognized citizens of these United States and degraded by the very law enforcement their tax dollars support. That event in Ferguson triggered the memory of all the many, many, many cases countrywide where youth and adults, especially black and brown people, have been killed by local and militarized policing forces.

 

This terrible event, along with the many before and after are part of my landscape, part of my DNA, and the call to action, to work together as a community to challenge these violent events is being illuminated and shouted out for all to bare witness to. Our collective witnessing is what is shifting our landscape and our consciousness”