I Was Complicit. Until They Tried to Kill Me.

I used to be complicit.
I didn’t mean to be. But I was.

I went to see The Bluest Eye—Toni Morrison’s haunting, brilliant cry into the dark. It starred one of my favorite actresses, and it gutted me. A searing portrait of what’s been done to Black women and girls for generations. I left the theater shaking. Sick. Reeling.

And then I ran into one of my dearest friends: Tamyka White—actor, writer, director, producer, and one of the fiercest, most courageous souls I know. I miss her fiercely.

I told her how devastated I was by the play.
And she—along with the women by her side—looked at me.
Not surprised. Just tired.

Tired of white women like me showing up with horror in our eyes, acting as though we’ve just discovered their pain. Tired of our epiphanies. Our soft, vague urgencies. Our delay.

“This is normal for us,” one of them said.

I heard it. I nodded. I probably said something like,
“Yeah… this needs to change.”

But I didn’t call Tamyka the next day.
I didn’t drop everything.
I didn’t say:
This ends now. This can’t go on.
We are not free. We are not human while this continues.

I just… went on with my life.
Because I could.

That’s what complicity looks like.

I didn’t make their suffering my emergency.
I didn’t let it reorder my world.

I understand now.
Because they came for me next.

They stripped me of my home, my voice, my work.
They trafficked me.
They stole $20 million.
They filed court papers while I was captive—
and no court stopped them.
They tried to erase me.

They failed. But they came close.

Now I see it clearly:
We are all complicit—until we refuse to be.
Until we let the horror reorder our lives.
Until we say:
No more.

Women are being silenced.
Erased.
Killed.
Systematically.

And unless we treat this as a war on our existence, by men against their own women, because that is what is actually happening:
it will continue.

We do not have the luxury of delay.
We are out of time.