Today I wanted to talk about Kyle Bassinga. Kyle was a 21 year old man from Georgia, whose family described him as "a kind, thoughtful, and smart young man who loved nature, music, and the people around him". Kyle Bassinga was killed on February 18th 2026, just ten days after his birthday. He was found hanging from a tree in a park.
The police ruled it a suicide. The family and local community demanded an investigation. The police refused to change their ruling.
I know this website it too white for this to really go anywhere, but an understanding of the present reality of white supremacy in the United States is just so important to transfeminism here. Lynchings never stopped, white supremacy never went away, you just stopped looking.
Juliana Nzita, A 16 year old Black girl, was just found hanging from a tree on church grounds in Charlotte, NC. Police have ruled it a suicide, despite hanging ourselves from trees being like the one communally agreed way Black folks ain’t killing ourselves.
Every time I go on Twitter or Facebook I learn about another recent lynching or missing Black person going mostly unreported. Half the reason I keep an active account on either of those sites is because they’re the only place I can find out about the violence happening to Black and Trans people reasonably quickly.
But I do need y’all to know that Black folks are currently, actively, being disappeared and lynched—if they even find our bodies. Black girls are and have been more often stolen into human trafficking, especially if they’re immigrants, but I’ve been seeing new news of probable lynchings every other day. Shit is worse than you think it is right now, tumblr just too white of a site to care lol
People argue "I've seen a case like this every few months and it's always been a suicide"
Been a suicide or been ruled a suicide?
Usually it’s ruled a suicide because cops or people affiliated with cops/prisons/legal system like lawyers or prosecutors did it then buried the body on land belonging to one of those organizations, such as I noted here: in this thread, where over 200 bodies were found buried behind a jail since 2016:
💬 41 🔁 9104 ❤️ 7352 · Green Book Global - Black Travel Made Easy - Tips for Travel · The Greenbook was a travel guide for Black people; it
Non-Black and/or non-US based people often wonder why so many left-leaning Black folks in the US try to operate alternate justice systems within smaller community such as restorative justice, transformative justice, etc. when “all over the world, activists and their ancestors have fought for access to legal systems like this” and this is why.
Our legal system is explicitly designed to kill and enslave Black people. Our legal system from the cops to the lawyers and courts (one of the few times we got justice) to the prisons is legalized slavery where prisons are privatized and corporations are encouraged to maximize their profit by incentivizing every part of this system to hold as many people as possible.
Black folks can be proven innocent after years of time in prison or on death row and still killed by the state or dying in prison because the goal was never justice, it was to keep culling and controlling the Black population.
And outside of the system, we are lynched, raped, abused, trafficked, and robbed by those involved in our legal system, lives often irreparably destroyed, entire lives disappeared with no justice because that is the point, not a flaw. It’s almost always those in the legal system or their families and friends doing this, so that it can be ruled a suicide or a runaway or intracommunity issues and swept away.
So when we look to justice systems that do not throw away a life of any human, it is because we do not wish to see them enslaved, murdered, raped, abused, etc. at the hands of the state, because that is what WILL happen here in the US. We become abolitionists because we see that the alternative option is to allow others to become enslaved. Because it’s a minimum we can do when 95% of the time there will be no justice for us no matter what.
