I once witnessed one Black kid shoot and kill another. Thankfully I didn't see it, just heard it, but it was close enough.

The victim was Neal Mack. He was an honorable young man who was an intern at Tendea Family, a group that trained violence interruptors. He was shot in the chest after attempting to deescalate an altercation.

The perpetrator was 15.

The narrative of the news was "This will piss off the rich white tourists." and "This is why we have to keep local kids out of parts of their own city."

LOCAL news did better.

After the shooting a white man told me to pretend the victim wasn't human in order to preserve my own mental health.

His name was Neal Mack.

He was 17 years old.

I will not forget him as long as I live. I will not dehumanize him. Our lives touched in the worst possible way. I grieve for what this young man might have become if he had had time to learn and mature.

But this is the thing? Dehumanizing the victim to protect our own mental health. Reducing things to statistics. We do these things and as white people in a racist society we are encouraged to do it when the victim happens to be Black. They aren't really people after all, right?

Wrong.