Beyond Anger: Embracing Compassion and Reflection After Charlie Kirk's Passing
- Lena Fields-Arnold
- Sep 24
- 18 min read
Updated: Nov 6
By Lena Fields-Arnold
22 September 2025
Social Justice/Wellbeing
Wilberforce, OH - When public figures like Charlie Kirk die, responses often reveal more about history than about the person themselves. For many Black Americans, his death has not produced quiet mourning, but a kind of grief expressed as anger. This anger is not apathy, nor is it hatred — it is grief shaped by centuries of trauma, injustice, betrayal, and erasure.
Let me begin by emphatically stating that violence against those who disagree with us is wrong. Those on social media celebrating his death and advocating for violence against his family are unconscionable! Consequently, using words like "it's time to fight back against evil" further widens the divide. Anger and introspection into a person's beliefs is acceptable so long as it does not rise to the level of advocating for more violence or celebrating the loss of a person's life.
This is the reality that is happening in the hearts of many Black Americans. An acknowledgment that what happened to him was wrong and painful, while simultaneously nursing the wounds still caused by many of the words he spoke in relation to their plight as Americans.
To outsiders, particularly conservatives, that anger may look like disrespect. But anger itself is a form of grief. It is the language of people whose pain has gone unheard for too long, of being told for too long that "it's not that bad," or "just get over it." It is from a deep feeling that their experiences and pain have too often been minimized or simplified.
To understand this, and to build compassion on both sides, we must step back and look honestly at what has shaped the Black American experience, and how that legacy still affects how Black people react to tragedies — including the deaths of public figures like Charlie Kirk.
This article aims to help conservatives understand that anger, while also pointing Black Americans to forgiveness. Toward a way both sides can move together into a place of understanding and compassion.
To understand contemporary reactions, you have to start with history.
Roots of the Hurt: Slavery, Jim Crow, Lynchings, and their Echoes
The enslavement of Black people was founded in the denial of Black personhood: bodily autonomy, families, and dignity. After emancipation, many of the same structures — laws, economic systems, cultural norms — ensured that many Black Americans remained in conditions not far removed from slavery in terms of labor exploitation, land loss, poverty, and social exclusion.
One of the first instances of "systemic racism" post-Civil War was the addition of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery — "except as a punishment for crime." That "except" created legal room for post-Civil War systems (Black Codes, convict leasing, and practices in prison labor, which continue to this day) to funnel Black bodies into forced labor-like conditions. Many do not notice it because today's prison slavery does not look like yesterday's chain gang.
Scholars and legal commentators have argued that the exception clause has been used to justify this coerced prison labor and to enable racialized control through the criminal-legal system. (University of Chicago News)
The violence of Jim Crow — codified segregation and voter suppression enforced by law — and the terrorism of lynchings are not distant abstractions. They are still alive in the trauma of grandparents and uncles who are still alive today to tell their stories.
The Equal Justice Initiative's research documents thousands of racial terror lynchings from Reconstruction through the mid-twentieth century and shows how that terror was public, communal, and intended to enforce racial subordination; its legacy endures. (Equal Justice Initiative)
The non-consensual uses of Black bodies in medical research and historic unequal treatment in health care systems produce measurable mistrust and worse health outcomes. The Tuskegee syphilis experiments (1932–1972), along with other documented violations, have created a deep, justified distrust of health systems, corporations, and government in many Black communities. That distrust shows up in decisions about health care, vaccination, and interactions with institutions that are supposed to help. (CDC)
The Enduring Legacy of Environmental Racism
The legacy of environmental racism and government betrayal is written into the lives of Black communities across this country. In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Army secretly sprayed zinc cadmium sulfide—a compound containing the known carcinogen cadmium—over predominantly Black and low-income neighborhoods in St. Louis, including the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex. Residents were told the mist was routine maintenance or part of harmless experiments. Still, the truth was far more grim: families were used as unwitting test subjects in a Cold War-era chemical experiment. Decades later, survivors are still fighting for justice and compensation.
This was not an isolated event. In Anniston, Alabama, Monsanto knowingly poisoned a largely Black community for decades by dumping toxic PCBs into waterways and neighborhoods. For years, the company concealed evidence of contamination, even as residents suffered high rates of illness, including cancer, neurological disorders, and birth defects. Only after lawsuits did the truth emerge, and the community remains scarred by both the chemicals, the diseases, the deaths, and the cover-up.
These cases are not accidents of history; they are patterns of disregard rooted in systemic racism that many of the left still deny exist. Black communities were targeted because they were deemed expendable. These are not merely historical wounds but ongoing ones. The toxins remain, the disease continues, and for some families, there may never be clarity about whether autoimmune disorders, cancers, or other conditions were passed on because of exposures they never consented to.
The Trauma of Accepted Violence
For many Black Americans, the trauma of racial violence is compounded by the knowledge that even the smallest accusation from a White person could historically result in death. The lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 — a 14-year-old boy brutally murdered after being accused by Carolyn Bryant of whistling at her — remains a searing example. Decades later, Bryant admitted that she had fabricated key parts of her story, a revelation that deepened generational pain (Devery, 2017).
For Black communities, this history is not distant, and it shapes how they respond today to deaths at the hands of police or other authorities. Their grief is not ignorance of crime within their own neighborhoods, but rather a direct response to the legacy of brutal, racially motivated killings and the knowledge that state institutions often looked the other way.
Concrete policy legacies that still hurt
Black Americans' pain is not only moral or emotional — it is material.
The U.S. imprisons Black people at far higher rates than White people. In 2018, there were roughly 1,501 Black prisoners for every 100,000 Black adults (vs 268 per 100,000 white adults), and racial disparities persist across arrest, charging, conviction, and sentence lengths. Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and subsequent research show how criminal-justice policy has served as a system of racial control in the modern era. (Pew Research Center)
Discrimination in USDA farm loans and services has been documented at scale; Pigford and related cases demonstrated decades of denial of credit and assistance that cost many Black families land, livelihoods, and intergenerational wealth. While Congress appropriated settlement funds (Pigford II) in 2010 after long litigation, these harms did not always end with the settlement, as many families remain landless. The 22,363 Black farmers recognized in the Pigford case do not count the untold thousands of black farmers who lost land or were economically impacted prior to the 2000s. In late 2023, I assisted two family members in applying for and receiving compensation after being unjustly denied loans.
Redlining, housing policy, and the GI Bill.
Government-backed policies — from redlining to discriminatory mortgage practices and the uneven implementation of the GI Bill — shaped who could buy homes in appreciating suburbs and who could not. That meant large wealth gaps between White and Black families that persist because home equity is a principal engine of intergenerational wealth in America. Richard Rothstein's work and archival records show how government policy and private prejudice drove segregation. (Economic Policy Institute)
Projects like Chicago's Cabrini-Green — underfunded, neglected, and then stigmatized — became loci of concentrated poverty, criminalization, and violence. Research on public-housing demolitions, mobility experiments, and concentrated poverty demonstrates that crime rises where institutional neglect concentrates disadvantage; conversely, dispersing poverty and investing in neighborhoods can reduce crime. The lived trauma of these projects still echoes today. (NBER)
Stolen opportunity: inventions, ideas, and the invisible tax
Beyond land and housing, there is another slow theft that compounds inequality: the appropriation of Black inventors' work or the structural barriers that kept Black innovators from capturing full economic value from their inventions. Histories of Elijah McCoy, Granville T. Woods, and many others demonstrate that Black inventiveness is real — but access to capital, the patent system's weaknesses, and outright appropriation by employers or competitors often meant that Black inventors, or their descendants, did not capture the same wealth that White inventors did. Scholarly work and museum archives document these patterns and their consequences for wealth accumulation. (National Museum of American History)
My own uncle and his best friend had their own invention stolen by a White employer. His best friend, who attempted to fight back via legal means, was found dead shortly after. My uncle's story is heartbreaking, and it is precisely the kind of lived experience that explains why some Black Americans see "choices" differently. Choices made under terror, threat, theft, or chronic deprivation are different from choices made in safety and with resources. This is the human cost of these structural problems.
Tulsa, Rosewood, and the Destruction of Black Prosperity
The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 remains one of the most devastating chapters in American history. Known as "Black Wall Street," Tulsa's Greenwood District was a thriving community of Black-owned businesses, banks, doctors' offices, and cultural institutions. Over the course of two days, white mobs, aided by law enforcement, looted and burned more than 1,200 homes and businesses, killing an estimated 100–300 Black residents and leaving thousands homeless. Insurance companies refused to pay claims, and government authorities offered no restitution. The result was not only a community destroyed, but also the erasure of generational wealth in an instant.
Tulsa was not an isolated case. Rosewood, Florida (1923), and Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), Cincinnati (1829 and 1841), Marion (1919), and Hough in Cleveland (1966), Ohio, saw similar massacres in which Black citizens were murdered, dispossessed, or forced to flee. In the mid-20th century, urban renewal projects and interstate highway construction displaced countless Black neighborhoods under the guise of "progress." These are just a few examples.
Even in the modern era, the destruction of Black communities persisted. In 1985, I watched the news as Philadelphia police dropped explosives on the headquarters of MOVE, a Black liberation group, igniting a fire that destroyed 61 homes and killed 11 people, including five children. I watched in horror as the city allowed the fire to burn.
Each of these events — whether called a massacre, "riot," renewal, or "public safety" — had the same result: the dismantling of Black prosperity. While White families accumulated homes, businesses, and land to pass down through generations, Black families were repeatedly stripped of wealth-building opportunities. This history reverberates today, where the median White household holds nearly eight times the wealth of the median Black household.
Why "angry" can be sorrow, restraint, and survival
Taken together, these structural patterns help explain why many Black people respond to public tragedies like Kirk's with complex grief and sometimes visible rage. It does not happen often. Most times, the rage is muted because Black people understand that loud anger brings risks, violence, and retaliation.
For example, Most HBCUs went on "high alert" in the days following Charlie Kirk's killing. From locking down their campuses after receiving terroristic or violent threats — to canceling classes or shelter-in-place orders. While the FBI found that most threats were not credible, the University's responses underscore how deeply vulnerable HBCU communities feel when national trauma centered around racist rhetoric flares.
At the same time, the majority of Black Americans do feel compassion for the bereaved families of Charlie Kirk, but their voices are drowned out or ignored by those who prefer to keep the division going.
Compassion and Critique can Coexist.
Given all this history, it's no wonder that many Black Americans see tragedy through a lens not just of the present event (like Kirk's death) but also this cumulative history. As a result, many Black people may feel hurt, betrayed, saddened, or even anger—not because they don't believe what happened is wrong, but rather because they feel that conservative Christian voices (or other public figures) have often minimized systemic racism. That they treat Black suffering as moral or spiritual failure and ignore structural causes一gaslighting them and not taking their concerns seriously.
It is not just history, it is today
For too long, conversations about racism in America have been treated as though they belong to history books—stories of Jim Crow, redlining, or segregated schools. But to frame racism only as a historical matter is to miss its ongoing, urgent reality. As Sabrina Pritchett warns, "when accomplishments, access, legal protections, and even the personhood of Black people are being torn apart in real time, framing this only as a historical matter risks obscuring the urgency of our present. These are not just struggles of the past; they are the lived reality of today. Naming that truth matters, because it honors the dignity of those who continue to fight for what should never have to be fought for again."
Recent events bear out her words. In Alabama, federal courts ruled that the state's congressional map violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the power of Black voters, who make up more than a quarter of the population but were confined to a single majority-Black district. Even after this finding, state leaders resisted drawing a fair map, delaying relief for years (Associated Press, 2023). This is not the past repeating itself—it is the present dismantling the fragile gains of the Civil Rights era.
When voting rights can be curtailed, when environmental protections for Black communities are struck down, and when accountability for police violence remains elusive, these are not echoes of history—they are the conditions shaping Black life right now. It is, as Pritchett reminds us, a way of honoring both truth and dignity.
Grifters, Polarizing Voices, The Insult of Dismissal, and the Power of Righteous Anger
What further sharpens the anger of many Black Americans is not only the weight of history, but the chorus of voices that dismiss or mock their pain. Black commentators like Officer Brandon Tatum, the Hodge Twins, Candace Owens, as well as people like Ben Shapiro and even Charlie Kirk, profit from telling audiences that systemic racism is a myth, that Black suffering is exaggerated, and that anger is nothing more than victimhood. For Black Christians especially, hearing such words from people who claim to be fellow believers can feel like betrayal — like being gaslit by one’s own family. This dismissal has become its own form of violence, further compounding wounds already centuries deep.
For example, some of Charlie Kirk's public statements about race, affirmative action, and Black public figures have stirred deep hurt in Black communities — not always because people assume malice, but because such words echo old wounds. Here are a few examples:
"If I see a Black pilot, I'm going to be like, 'Boy, I hope he's qualified." (Newsweek+2Wikipedia+2)
He called Black women in public service "moronic," and questioned whether they were hired for their excellence or because of affirmative action. (The Black Wall Street Times+1)
He referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as "awful … not a good person," and said that passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was "a huge mistake," claiming it led to a permanent bureaucracy of DEI-type programs. (Wikipedia+1 )
He criticized prominent Black leaders — Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sheila Jackson Lee — calling their achievements the result of affirmative action and suggesting they "did not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously" (The Black Wall Street Times+1)
He constantly asserted that systemic racism was not real and that all Black suffering could be directly tied to Black behaviors.
Can conservatives see how statements like these — even if meant as critiques of policy or culture — may be heard by many Black people as attacks on their dignity, competence, and personhood? Even if Kirk did not intend to hurt, words like this can feel like a reminder of being questioned because of skin color, of being assumed lesser, of constantly having to prove one's worth. Understanding that feeling doesn't require agreement on every issue — it requires humility, compassion, and empathy.
Anger and compassion are not necessarily opposites. Scripture itself affirms this. Jesus overturned tables in the temple when confronted with exploitation and injustice. Ephesians 4:26 declares, "Be angry, and do not sin." Anger in the biblical sense is not about hatred; it is about truth-telling and a holy refusal to let injustice masquerade as peace.
So, when some Black Americans express fury at Charlie Kirk, it is not a celebration of a life lost. It is grief — grief translated into the only language oppression has left. And that anger can coexist with compassion. This is the message that Black Americans must emphatically agree on. As we want white conservatives to have compassion for the plight of Black America, we must also have compassion for Kirk's family, who did not deserve their loss. We should also pray for those conservatives who may be struggling to understand why the response feels so different from their own. Why, because this is what Christ compels us to do.
What White, Christian Americans (or Others) Should Understand
For those outside this lived history, especially White, Christian Americans, whose worldview often emphasizes individual responsibility, free speech, and moral clarity; it may be hard to recognize the depth of hurt beneath the surface of Black grief and anger. But true compassion requires more than sympathy — it requires listening, humility, and an openness to see the world through another's eyes.
I would urge you to combine compassion with listening carefully without dismissing or minimizing. When Black Americans describe systemic racism, this is not a plea for victimhood but an articulation of real harms. Denying these experiences or framing them as exaggeration only compounds the pain.
Recognize that "angry" is not "not caring." Some respond to injustice with silence or sorrow because anger can feel unsafe or unproductive. Others express grief through outrage. Both responses are valid, and both flow from the same place of historical trauma.
Acknowledge the hard truths about America. While there is a lot of good in our history, there is also a lot of bad. Acknowledging the bad, does not have to undermine what is good, but ignoring it does. It is one thing to affirm that racism is wrong; it is another to look honestly at how history continues to frame policies, laws, and economic patterns that often perpetuate inequity. It's okay to support changes that build opportunities for equity. It means understanding that people are not looking for a handout, but rather for an open door.
It also means being mindful to really hear the pain and acknowledge it. Even a simple "I hear you" builds trust. It means not always blaming the poor for their circumstances and being willing to engage in small acts that demonstrate a willingness to repair. For example, just yesterday, a random white couple handed me a rock of kindness. I don’t know, maybe they do that to everybody, but in that moment, I knew they saw me and that I mattered.
Finally, it means speaking up against dehumanizing rhetoric. When online commentators, or even friends and family, reduce Black experiences to "culture" or "bad choices," counter with compassion and facts, because in today’s public world, silence often signals assent.
A Place for Compassion, on Both Sides
Let listening to the grief and anger of Black communities be received as an invitation to deeper understanding. Not as a call to accept blame personally, but rather in recognition that history and systems have inflicted wounds that still shape lives.
Respond with gentleness rather than defensiveness. Choosing to move beyond "debate" into empathy means laying aside the urge to win an argument and instead allowing someone else's humanity to touch your own.
As Black Americans, it is ok and human to feel anger, sorrow, or frustration in the face of injustice, yet within that space, there is also room for mourning—even for the loss of someone whose politics or worldview you feel may have caused harm. To grieve does not erase the pain; rather, it honors the complexity of our shared human story.
Anger can coexist with a hope for better, not worse. Remember, that "Black" America is still America, and we should all be concerned about the things that impact all of America. Freedom of speech, freedom to lawfully assemble, the right to bear arms-these all shape the narratives that lift up resilience, creativity, and dignity. These thrust off the weight of victimization and weave a beautiful tapestry of shared humanity—even when disagreements run deep.
If we allow it, these conversations will reveal a common ground, and that is a shared longing for dignity, safety, and justice. Across these differences, we can agree that no one should be silenced, deceived, or made to feel invisible. That through tangible acts of trust, we can repair breaches. Building constructive bridges by choosing to listen instead of dismissing, offering presence instead of avoidance, ignoring voices designed to divide, and extending respect where contempt has long been sown.
These acts invite a future where humanity is not fractured along the lines of race, faith, or politics, but knit together through the shared pursuit of peace, righteousness, justice, and care.
The death of Charlie Kirk is a tragedy. No one should lose their life simply for speaking what they believe is true, for belonging to a religion, or being outspoken. Even if one disagreed with him or opposed his views, there is still room for compassion: toward his family, toward those who loved him, toward those who see his passing as a loss.
At the same time, the hurt Black Americans carry is real — not made up, not oversensitive, but built on centuries of injustice. Real change requires acknowledgment.
Both sides must be willing to listen, to understand, and to forgive. Justice is not only about righting wrongs in institutions but about recognizing each other's humanity and shared longing for peace, fairness, and love.
About the Author
Lena Arnold author, poet, songwriter, motivational speaker…is the author of For This Child We Prayed: Living with the Secret Shame of Infertility, For This Dream We Prayed Companion Journal, Strong Black Coffee: Poetry and Prose to Encourage, Enlighten, and Entertain Americans of African Descent, In the Absence of My Father, Scenes From the City and the children’' book Jackie's Way: Jackie's Terrible Temper-a children's book that teaches young people how to deal with bullying and also provides concrete ways to manage anger.
Her work has been featured in numerous periodicals, including "Free to Fly: Transitions for the Seasons in a Woman's Life," published by InSCRIBEd Inspirations and The Speaker Anthology, Vol 1: 101 Stories That Have Inspired and Motivated Audiences from Coast to Coast by Kent Gustavson and Sally Shields (Editor). As a motivational speaker, Lena applies the lessons learned from clinical infertility to the social, emotional, and spiritual infertility many of us feel in various areas of our lives. As a wife and mother of three—including her "double blessing" of twin sons—Lena seeks to encourage and empower women to "give birth" to all their dreams!
Lena received her master's degree in executive leadership from Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA, and her bachelor's in mass communications from Wright State University in Dayton, OH. As a journalist, she has written for several periodicals and was endorsed by the late CBS News Correspondent Ed Bradley for "…being a thoughtful writer who goes beyond…"
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