Bullet Points

Brown has said in Mississippi Quarterly that “Bullet Points” is “a poem born out of a sense of desperation that comes from a fact of my life. I don’t want anybody saying that I killed myself if I’m ever in police custody” (Rudnicki, Rob. “Locked in a Room with Jericho Brown.” Mississippi Quarterly 70, no. 2 (2017): 225-242). This anti-suicide note was written in 2015, after several incidents where Black citizens were killed by the police over the course of two years. Many of these killings made national news for their brutality, including those of John Crawford, Michael Brown (no relation to the poet), Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and Victor White III, among others. Brown refers to many of these figures in The Tradition. Several of the incidents occurred in suspicious contexts and some were covered up by police, while others were documented on bystander cell phones. Viewing this footage caused social outrage. Activists protested such treatment and used the tag #BlackLivesMatter on media posts to describe their feeling. The moniker (and its abbreviation, BLM) became a shorthand to discuss racial discrimination and to raise awareness. Although never a centralized movement, street protests under the banner of BLM occurred nationwide after the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. International attention was raised again when, in 2020, bystanders filmed the murder of George Floyd, who was Black, at the hands of police officer Derek Chauvin, who was white. This resulted in nationwide protests attended by millions. During this time, “Bullet Points” was used to help frame the event and the poem went viral on media sources.