There are days that we do not forget.

For many of us, Saturday, August 9, 2014 is one of them. We remember where we were shortly after noon CST when we learned that an 18-year-old boy who was two days shy of starting college was killed by a police officer in the middle of Canfield Drive in a town just outside of St. Louis.

Even if we weren’t there, the details feel intimate.

We know the boy’s name is Mike Brown. We know the name of the officer who murdered him is Darren Wilson. We know that Mike was just walking home with a friend inthestreet, and that he didn’t make it. We know there was an altercation between him and the officer’s bullets, and that Mike’s lifeless body was left face down in the summer heat, out in the open, for four and a half hours after. All the while his mother was left on the perimeter, access denied to the body of the son that she birthed and who, on that day, she learned she would have to bury.

In the evenings that would follow, local denizens took to the streets demanding answers for what happened to Mike. Through live streams, it became clear a gathering of peaceful protestors demanding justice and the journalists covering them were treated like enemy combatants. And again, from Oakland to Chicago, from Austin to New York to Charlotte, millions of us across the country were witnesses. We saw how people exercising their first amendment rights were met with military-grade equipment and police shooting rubber bullets and tear gas canisters into bodies and backyards.

We were Ferguson. We still are.

On the one-year anniversary of Mike Brown’s death and the uprising that followed in Ferguson, I am reminded that so much of the way I carry him is based on social media.

When major media outlets are slow to tell our stories, we are taking hold of platforms such as Twitter and YouTube.

We are not waiting for anyone. Those of us on the front lines, within and beyond Ferguson, are telling the world in real-time what is happening to us, and, as a result, one of the undeniable facts of the past year is that we are in a moment when our tools for dismantling racism are finally up to speed with racism itself.

In 1955, Emmett Till’s mother used photography. By allowing photos to be taken of her son’s body in an open casket for Jet magazine’s September 15th issue, she brought attention to the unspeakable frequent horrors of lynching to the masses, catalyzing the Civil Rights Movement. The movement would take advantage of video footage to bring the reality of being water hosed, beaten by batons and having police dogs sicked on non-violent protestors to the white middle-class suburban dinner table. And likewise, the availability of personal video cameras and a willing recorder gave us evidence in the brutal beating of Rodney King by LAPD.

For each, technology gave the world a window into the multifaceted dimensions of American anti-black racism. But each, as a product of their time, required a delay we do not depend on today. The development of a still photograph takes seconds with a smartphone, and video footage can be uploaded in a moment through platforms such as YouTube and Vine. Through social media, we are able to connect the evidence without requiring someone else’s approval.

And we can do all of this ourselves.

We know what racism is. We know how racism feels. And we are finally in a moment where we are equipped with resources across states and time zones to collectively call racism like it is at the exact moments when it manifests itself in our lives.

It is one thing to say that an unarmed black person is killed every 28 hours in this country. But that small amount of time for the cycle to repeat itself gains a different kind of salience when there have only been nine days when police have not killed someone in the US this year; when we know 12-year-old Tamir was gunned down by an officer in two seconds; when Sandra was assaulted by an officer during a routine traffic stop the moment she refused to put out a cigarette in her own car; when Christian, a year older than Mike, became the 696th person and 179th black person killed by a police officer in 2015 on this past Friday.

The information calling out institutional racism is replicating at a viral speed that matches the viral workings of white supremacy itself. At times this is difficult to bear, and I, like others, have had to find creative means for self-care so as not to be consumed by the death that seems to be forever looming. And yet, simultaneously I know that racism is losing its edge over us. It cannot hide behind the technological delays it has previously used to sustain itself , which gives me unwavering faith in our particularly millennial pursuit of justice.

In the race for our lives, we are neck and neck with white supremacy. Through citizen campaigns such as #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and #IfIDieInPoliceCustody, the advantages white supremacy has been using are being called for the fouls that they are the moment they are played. There are no more excuses. And as a consequence, I not only believe we will be the first to the finish line. I now believe that when we arrive (because we will arrive), the only thing that will be left of white supremacy will be its ashes from which we will bring to fruition the future we have always imagined. A future where we are, without question, black, alive and living well in a space where we can find comfort and sanctuary in being our fullest selves.

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