So I moved back to the East Coast, but I kept my home in East Austin and still visit when I can. It’s my home away from home.
I learned about the bombings on Twitter, and it was surreal to read these familiar names in the middle of the horror. These were people I wrote about, people I knew, people I shared laughs with: Nelson Linder, the head of the Austin N.A.A.C.P., and Freddie Dixon, a pillar of the community, discussing the deaths of 17-year-old Draylen Mason and 39-year-old Anthony Stephan House.
I worried for the people I knew, and then I felt, again, that deep, lonely sadness. I wasn’t the only one made to feel that I didn’t belong. Someone was targeting black people, but once the bombs appeared in other neighborhoods, the authorities no longer seemed willing to consider the possibility that hate crimes had been committed.
I don’t know what else to call them. When the bombings started, I had been writing about the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, so I knew the faces of martyrs of the civil rights movement. Whenever I hear about bombs and black people, I think of the four little girls murdered in Birmingham, Ala. I have family ties to Philadelphia, too, so I think of the Move bombings. Are there any black people who can separate news of bombs from notions of terror?
We are in an unusual cultural moment. There has been so much truth-telling over the past few months, so much affirmation about speaking truth to power. I hoped that this time, the authorities might acknowledge that, yes, black people were targeted. I thought someone might make the connection — East Austin is the only place in the city where black and brown people still live in large numbers, and they remain vocal. There are people who are afraid of that, and are threatened by that, and that makes East Austin a target. Instead, there was silence, as these concerns disappeared into the broader panic about where a bomb might strike next.