News broke on Monday that Oluwatoyin Salau, a 19-year-old Black Lives Matter activist, was found dead in Tallahassee days after she’d tweeted about being sexually assaulted by a Black man. On Tuesday a video of a young Black woman being thrown into a Dumpster by a group of Black men went viral, and later the same day a video of a Black man hitting a Black woman in the face with a skateboard spread across tens of thousands of Twitter feeds. Just a few weeks ago, yet another viral video showed a group of Black men attacking Iyanna Dior, a Black trans woman. Meanwhile, Breonna Taylor’s murderers are all still free. It’s been an exhausting time for Black women, and many have taken to social media to express their frustrations with fighting for a community that too often does not reciprocate the love and protection they give it.
While he neither confirmed nor denied that the song was about Noname, he did mention her and encouraged people to follow her: “I love and honor her as a leader in these times,” he wrote. “She has done and is doing the reading and the listening and the learning on the path that she truly believes is the correct one for our people.”
“Let’s have conversations in tandem to going to marches, protests, sit-ins, and whatever else we do with our physical bodies to resist,” Noname said during her conversation with Riley. “I say let’s sit in a circle and read these books together.”
