Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching by Mychal Denzel Smith

Author:Mychal Denzel Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781568585291
Publisher: Nation Books
Published: 2016-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

On May 17, 2013, thirty-two-year-old Mark Carson was shot in the face in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. He and a friend were confronted by three men, one of whom said to them, “Look at these faggots,” and “What are you, gay wrestlers?” The groups exchanged words before Carson and his friend decided it was best they walk away, but the three men followed them, yelling things like “faggot” and “queer” in their direction. One of them, Elliot Morales, pulled out a gun and, while pointing it at the two men, said, “Do you want to die right now?,” to which Carson replied, “Do you want to shoot us in front of all these people?” Morales then shot Carson and ran away. Mark Carson was taken to local Beth Israel Hospital where he was pronounced dead.

“I thought that kind of hate stuff was gone, but I see that it’s not,” Mark’s father, Mark Carson Sr., said. “It’s simply ridiculous. People are what people are. They do what they do. You can’t knock down who people are.”

Twenty-two-year-old Dionte Greene was also shot in the face. In the early hours of October 31, 2014, Greene, a Kansas City resident, had plans to meet a person with whom he’d had online correspondence—some “trade”—before attending a party. “Trade,” according to Guardian writer Zach Stafford, is a term “used within black LGBT communities to describe a man who doesn’t ‘appear gay’ but who engages in sex with men unbeknownst to his family and most of his friends. Trade is a man you don’t necessarily trust—more of a risk than many are willing to take.”

Greene sat in his car at the spot where he’d agreed to meet with this “trade,” talking on the phone with a friend while waiting for the man to arrive. “He looks just like his Facebook picture,” Greene told his friend on the other line as the man approached the car. Before the line went dead, Greene’s friend heard yelling. Dionte was found dead later that morning.

“I wasn’t so much against it,” Coshelle Greene, Dionte’s mother, told Stafford about how she felt when Dionte “came out” to her at age sixteen. “I just didn’t want it for mine. I just knew how society looks at it, and how it’s so frowned upon.”

Mark Carson and Dionte Greene were killed in the same years where outrage over the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Michael Brown, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, and others fueled protests, uprisings, and new conversations about the dangers facing young black men in America. But their names are not included in that ever-growing tragic roll call. They don’t make it onto the Helvetica font T-shirts, aren’t part of the chants emanating from the streets; their hashtag funerals were sparsely attended. I didn’t sit down to write a book because their deaths made me ask questions about my identity and place in the world.

Mark and Dionte were young, black, and male and should have fit the criteria for inclusion in the club of martyrdom.

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