Why Do Us Black Folks Always Have to Prove That We Were Wronged?

I have not spoken to a single Black person who is not suspicious about what happened to Nolan Wells. Not one. And every week that passes, with the conflicting accounts and now the FBI looking into threats against witnesses, that suspicion has not eased. It has settled.

Let me say first what has to be said. This family deserves to know what happened to their child. They deserve justice, and they deserve to feel safe in the place they call home. Nothing I write here matters more than that.

But watching this case, I keep returning to something larger, something underneath it. Because I have seen how this goes. When a Black person is hurt or harmed in this country, especially by white people or by the state, we are not simply allowed to be wronged. We are handed a burden. And it is not one burden. It is three.

We carry all of them, every time, and we carry them in the worst week of our lives.

The first is the burden of proving our humanity was worth protecting in the first place.

Before the country will grant that a loss even happened, we have to establish that the person we lost was good. Not just innocent. Good. We have to produce the photos, the report cards, the character witnesses, the coaches, the pastor. We have to show that the child was beloved, as if being human were not enough to be worth protecting. Watch how every Black family in this position is pushed to canonize their child before the body is even in the ground. They do it because they know the value of that life is not assumed. It has to be proven.

It is why, I imagine, so many of our families reach for a civil rights attorney before there is even a suspect or a charge. I do not know all the reasons Nolan’s family made the choices they made. But I know why I would. You make that call not because you are litigious, but because you already know, from the first phone call, that your child’s rights can be trampled by the state unless somebody stands watch. The watchdog is not a luxury. It is the price of admission.

The second is the burden of proving we were actually wronged at all.

This is the one that cuts deepest. Because the starting posture, when a Black child turns up dead around white people, is not “what was done to him.” It is a quiet, unspoken drift toward the idea that maybe he brought it on himself. Two days after Nolan was last seen, before the autopsy, before toxicology, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office said no foul play was suspected. A sitting judge, whose stepson was on that island, went on Facebook to lay out the boys’ account of the day before the county had one of its own.

Look at the shape of those first moves. Neither was about finding out what happened to Nolan. Both were about reassurance. About lowering the temperature, about steering everyone toward nothing-to-see-here, in light of circumstances that were anything but settled. That is the default doing its work. The victim is presumed complicit in his own death until his family can prove otherwise, and the proving is on them.

We know what it sounds like when the country believes a wrong occurred. When a white child goes missing, there are press conferences, task forces, federal agents inside of a day. Nobody stands at a podium and tells the public to relax. That is what it looks like when a life is assumed to be worth the full weight of the state. Nolan did not get it. Instead his family got the burden of proof.

The third is the burden of doing the work to hold the wrongdoers accountable.

Even after you have proven the humanity, even after you have proven the wrong, the labor of accountability lands on you too. The state will not carry it. So a family flies a child’s body out of state for a second opinion. Perhaps because they cannot trust the first. Perhaps because generations of us have learned not to. I cannot tell you exactly what was in their hearts. I can tell you what would be in mine. They fight in public for weeks just to get anyone to examine the phone. They keep the story alive so it does not disappear. They become the investigators, the publicists, and the pallbearers, all at once, all while grieving.

That is the trifecta. Prove he mattered. Prove he was wronged. Then do the work of justice yourselves. Three walls to break through before you even reach the starting line where every other family begins.

And this is the part I need people to sit with. None of those three burdens are about Nolan, specifically. They are about a structure. Racism did not just build the harm. It built the aftermath. It built a system where the wronged are treated as the accused, where a grieving mother has to argue for her son’s worth, and where the people who should be answering questions get to ask them instead.

This is not us reaching. This is not us wanting it to be about race. This is us recognizing a pattern our bodies know by heart, because our experience put it there. We know how easily a Black life gets devalued and dismissed. We know this present moment carries the same characteristics as the past, the same culture of anti-Blackness that has always insisted we are not deserving of justice. And we know the tell, because it never changes: the burden lands on us to prove we were wronged, instead of on the people who wronged us to answer for it.

That is the whole approach to race in this country. Flip the burden. Make the injured party prove the injury. Then make them prove it was worth caring about. Then make them chase the accountability alone.

I want justice for Nolan Wells and safety for his family. I also want us to name the machine that makes them fight this hard for it, because they are not the first and they will not be the last.

I wrote a longer piece for Contraband Camp on why this case has such a grip on Black America, and why our distrust is an inheritance and not a figment. If this resonated, read the full essay there.