Black Girl From Eugene: I left because the US is not safe
2 min read
Feeling Confronted Is Part of the Process
by Ayisha Elliott, Black Girl From Eugene
Death, from what I understand, is a release for the person who is dying. It’s the rest of us who struggle to reconcile it, especially when death is violent, when it comes too close, when it takes someone young or someone we thought was protected.
I don’t think it’s death itself we’re wrestling with. It’s loss, specifically, the loss of the unknown and of control. I think humans assign meaning to how a person dies because we need a way to make sense of the inevitable, to keep it feeling ordered rather than random. That order is what gives us a sense of security. Security being something every human needs.
I think about this because it’s part of why I left the United States. I left because of the lack of security, and because of how far my community’s values have drifted from the country’s.
It was clear to me that things would escalate quickly after January 2025, in a way I knew my own nervous system couldn’t sustain. “Lack of security” is an understatement when you’re a survivor of police brutality.
I can only pray that my community back home does not repeat the concessions we have been directed towards since 2016 when the violence of our community increased in visibility, yet again. Now while lynchings increase, specifically young Black men killed by people they know, by “friends,” here’s what sits with me most:
It isn’t the deaths themselves, or even the grim consistency of them. It’s the ease with which a style of death—one that’s been stamped into our collective memory as unforgivable—gets explained back to us as reasonable, as probable, as understandable.
Knowing lynching is not self-inflicted within Black and Brown communities, that ease is its own kind of hypocrisy. It suggests that white communities have evolved past this, when, as a whole, they haven’t. The work of actually stopping the terror isn’t a conversation progressive white people are having yet. White people are killing their Black friends. This isn’t isolated.
(Continue reading on Substack)
If you’d like to work with Ayisha on dismantling this cultural norm, whether in your organization or small groups, contact her at BlackGirlFromEugene@gmail.com.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ayisha Elliott, All Rights Reserved. Read for and reprinted in part by KEPW Whole Community News with permission of Ayisha Elliott.
Image: The 1936 photograph of a flag flown from an upper story window of the NAACP headquarters on 69 Fifth Ave., New York City, announcing that “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday,” as it appeared on the NAACP Eugene-Springfield Branch website.
