Current Crisis – Hands up doesn’t mean help is coming.
He couldn’t hear the sirens.
Didn’t flinch at the commands.
Didn’t “comply fast enough.”
They said he was resisting.
He signed, slowly.
Gestures learned from a lifetime
of not being heard.
They mistook it for aggression.
Or witchcraft.
Or just something they didn’t feel like decoding.
They pinned him to the sidewalk.
Knees. Elbows. Yelling.
He still couldn’t hear.
But he could feel every ounce of what they meant.
His phone had a card that read:
“I am Deaf. I communicate with sign language or text.”
But no one read it.
No one ever does.
The body cam footage never showed fear.
Only confusion.
And confusion, in this country,
gets you killed if you’re too brown
too poor
or too disabled to explain fast.
He lived.
This time.
But now he signs with a tremor.
And sleeps with the light on.
And flinches when someone walks behind him too quickly.
Because when the world doesn’t speak your language—
it translates your silence as threat.
