Four words started this.

James Tate posted that Black people don’t take their own lives, and when I answered with the 988 number, he told me to “stop it.” I am not going to stop, and by the time you finish this, I am hoping you won’t either.

If you are hurting right now, skip my whole article. Call or text 988 instead. Veterans, press 1. It is free, it runs 24 hours, and the person who picks up does not care what color you are or who you voted for.

Okay. The rest of you, pull up a chair. Class is in session.

— THE EXCHANGE —

On October 4,

@JamesTate121

posted this:

“Black people don’t hang themselves from trees and whistleblowers don’t kill themselves.”

I called it racist and posted the crisis line. His comeback, in full: “You know what I am saying. Stop it.”

Then the cavalry showed up. Two accounts repeated his sentence word for word, apparently on the theory that a claim said twice becomes a peer-reviewed study. A third informed me that I “watch a child in danger and do nothing.” I enjoyed that one, mostly because the crisis number was sitting in the same thread. Twice. In plain English. With digits.

I do know what James is saying. I have heard that sentence, and its whole extended family, my entire life. “We don’t do that.” “That’s a white-people thing.” “Just pray harder.” “Man up.” Every one of them sounds like pride when you say it out loud.

In practice, it works like a smoke detector with the battery pulled out. Very reassuring, right up until the kitchen is on fire.

— WHERE I AM COMING FROM —

I was an Army combat medic, Iraq included. After that I was a civilian paramedic. These days I teach Physics and Anatomy in a high-need district, where plenty of folks long ago decided these kids were somebody else’s problem.

All three of those jobs taught me the same thing, and I would tattoo it on the inside of every eyelid in America if the budget allowed. The person in trouble almost never announces it. He goes quiet. He gives stuff away. He gets oddly calm after weeks of being a wreck. And the people who love him most explain every bit of it away with whatever they were raised to believe.

The Army taught me that one the hard way. Veterans take their own lives at a far higher rate than civilians, and for decades the culture said exactly what James said. Soldiers don’t do that. We are tough. We handle it. Then we stood in formation and saluted boots, a rifle, and a helmet.

When the military finally started talking about it out loud, more guys raised their hands. Silence kept my brothers from asking for help, and a direct question was what finally got some of them to.

— THE MYTH HAS A BODY COUNT —

I am a science teacher, so we are going to look at data now. Try to contain your excitement.

In 2019 the Congressional Black Caucus formed an Emergency Taskforce on Black Youth Suicide and Mental Health. They named their report “Ring the Alarm.” That came from the CBC, not a MAGA rally or a Fox chyron, and it warned that suicide among Black youth was climbing faster than in any other racial or ethnic group.

A year before that, a study in JAMA Pediatrics found Black children ages 5 to 12 dying by suicide at about twice the rate of white children the same age. Five to twelve. Those are kids who still need help opening a Go-Gurt.

Across all ages, the CDC counts more than 3,000 Black Americans lost to suicide every year, and the rate rose by roughly a quarter between 2018 and 2023.

Researchers who study this keep running into the same belief in their focus groups and family interviews: suicide is something OTHER people do. That belief keeps parents from asking, keeps pulpits quiet, and keeps teenagers from ever saying the words out loud. After all, if “we don’t do that,” the kid who is thinking about it must be broken in some special, shameful, keep-it-in-the-house kind of way.

So he says nothing. His family, armed with a slogan, asks nothing. And everybody calls that strength.

— HORSES, NOT ZEBRAS —

Every medic and paramedic learns the same rule in about week two: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. The common thing is common. You rule it out first, and you do not skip it because the rare thing makes a better story.

James’s sentence is a zebra hunt. It looks at a death and reaches straight past the explanation that happens thousands of times a year for the one that, on the court record of the last decade, I cannot find happening at all.

I have a name for this in my classroom. It is the student who sees the ball fall off the desk and insists it was a magnet in the ceiling, because gravity is “too obvious.” I give him partial credit for imagination and a zero for physics.

— THE HISTORY IS REAL. SO WAS THE FILIBUSTER. —

Somebody in the replies is going to pretend I said lynching never happened, so let me save him the typing. Lynching happened, and it was evil. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. Crowds brought their kids. Photographers sold postcards. Almost nobody went to prison.

I understand why a Black man sees a death under a tree and fears the worst. Generations earned that fear the hard way.

Now, who stood where? In 1922, Republican Rep. Leonidas Dyer of Missouri pushed an anti-lynching bill through the House, and Southern Democrats filibustered it to death in the Senate. They did it again to the Costigan-Wagner bill in the 1930s. Nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in the first half of the twentieth century, and the Senate passed exactly zero of them. In 2005 the Senate formally apologized for that record, which was very big of them, roughly eighty years late.

In 1964, Republicans backed the Civil Rights Act at a higher rate than Democrats in both chambers, about 80 percent of House Republicans to 61 percent of House Democrats. Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, a former Klan recruiter, filibustered it for more than 14 hours. That is a long time to talk when you have nothing worth saying.

“But Mike, the parties switched!”

Did they, though? I took that bedtime story apart brick by brick right here:

https://x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2019505744949710949

And I will give credit where it belongs. In 2022 the Emmett Till Antilynching Act passed the House 422 to 3 and became law. Both parties. Good. That is how it should work, and I cheered.

So we can set lynching aside. Nobody here is defending it, and the kids are still waiting.

— WHAT THE CASE FILES ACTUALLY SAY —

June 2020. Two men in Southern California, Robert Fuller and Malcolm Harsch, were found dead a few days apart. Protesters called them lynchings, and national outlets ran with it for weeks. Both deaths were ruled suicides. In the Harsch case, surveillance video showed he was alone, and his own family watched it and accepted the finding.

Same month. A garage pull rope in Bubba Wallace’s NASCAR stall was reported as a noose and a hate crime. The FBI found it had been tied that way since October 2019, before anybody knew which driver would get that stall.

Then came September 2026.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (

@RepPressley

) organized a letter, signed by nearly sixty House Democrats, demanding a federal investigation into every hanging death of a Black person in the country. She called it a “national crisis.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (

@AOC

) posted that it was “racial terror” and “widespread modern-day lynchings.”

What is next? Members of Congress declaring a national lynching crisis before the medical examiners even finish their reports… oh, wait. I am being told nearly sixty of them already did. My mistake.

Community Notes stacked up under those posts like dirty dishes in a dorm sink, pointing to law enforcement and medical examiner findings. Most of the high-profile cases had already been ruled suicides. One of them, a 16-year-old in Charlotte who died in May, police had ruled a suicide months before the letter. In the one clear homicide, Tasia Fortune in Jackson, Mississippi, police charged a suspect who is also Black, according to reporting at the time. That is a murder, and I want a conviction. It is also nothing like the racial lynching the letter described.

Should every suspicious death be investigated? Yes. All of them. Autopsy, video, phone records, the works. You will never find me arguing against an investigation.

So I have one question for Rep. Pressley and every name on that letter, and it is multiple choice.

You did not read the case files before you signed.
You read them and did not understand them.
You understood them perfectly and signed anyway, because “lynching” polls better than “mental health.”

Pick one. I will wait. None of the three looks good on someone whose job is to represent grieving families.

Here is what that letter actually did, whether anybody meant it to or not. It told a mother who already had a suicide ruling that the ruling was a lie. It told a teenager with a dark secret that if he ever acts on it, his family will spend years chasing a phantom instead of asking why nobody saw the signs. And it handed “we don’t do that” a gold-plated, congressionally embossed certificate of authenticity.

That letter had the scientific rigor of a Magic 8-Ball, and the 8-Ball at least admits “reply hazy, try again.”

— THE NUMBER THAT SHOULD END THE ARGUMENT —

Here is the side-by-side nobody on that letter wanted to run.

Convictions for a racial lynching of a Black victim by hanging in the last ten years: I have looked, and I cannot find one on the court record.

Black Americans lost to suicide in that same decade: tens of thousands.

That is a junior high kid trying to outrun a freight train.

If you care about Black lives, and I do, you spend your breath where the bodies are. Those bodies are in bedrooms, in parked cars, in dorm rooms, and in barracks. They belong to kids whose families never asked, because they were sure they already knew the answer.

— WHAT THE BIBLE DOES WITH A MAN WHO WANTS TO DIE —

Some folks will tell me this is a spiritual problem, so just pray about it. I am a Christian, so let’s open the Book.

In 1 Kings 19, the prophet Elijah is fresh off one of the biggest victories in the entire Old Testament. Fire from heaven. Four hundred fifty prophets of Baal embarrassed in front of everybody. Then one death threat from Jezebel, and he runs into the wilderness, sits down under a broom tree, and asks God to take his life.

God does not tell him, “Prophets don’t do that.” He does not hand him a slogan or a sermon.

He sends an angel who touches him, feeds him, and lets him sleep. Then the angel does it a second time. Only after Elijah has eaten and rested does God talk with him, and when they are done, God sends him back toward people and gives him a companion, Elisha, so he does not walk alone anymore.

Food, rest, someone present, and a friend. That is the biblical crisis-response protocol, and it beats 988 by about 2,800 years.

Psalm 34:18 says Yahweh is near to the brokenhearted and saves those crushed in spirit. Galatians 6:2 tells us to bear one another’s burdens. Pretty hard to bear a burden you refuse to believe exists.

So, to the pastors reading this: you have more reach into Black families than any agency in Washington. Preach on Elijah under the broom tree this month. Say the word “suicide” from the pulpit. Put 988 in the bulletin. You might be the only adult some kid trusts enough to hear it from.

— YOUR 60-SECOND PLAYBOOK —

This is what I teach my students, what I learned with my soldiers, and what I would want somebody to do for my own kids. It works for any child, any color, any age.

Watch for:

o Talk about being a burden, feeling trapped, or not being around much longer.

o Giving away things they care about. The favorite hoodie. The game system. The dog.

o Pulling away from friends, practice, church, everything.

o A sudden calm after a long rough stretch. People read that as “he’s doing better.” Sometimes it means a decision has been made.

o Changes in sleep, eating, or drinking, and grades going off a cliff.

If you see it, here is your 60 seconds:

o Ask directly: “Are you thinking about killing yourself?” Asking does not plant the idea. Researchers settled that one years ago. It opens the door.

o Listen. Do not argue, preach, or fix. Let them talk.

o Stay with them, and put some distance between them and anything they could use to hurt themselves.

o Call or text 988 together. Veterans press 1. If someone is in immediate danger, call 911.

o Check in the next day. And the day after that.

That’s the whole thing. It fits on an index card. No degree required, no party affiliation required, and absolutely no congressional letter required.

— TO JAMES —

James, I don’t think you are a bad man. I think somebody who loved you handed you that slogan because they believed it would protect you. Plenty of us got handed slogans like that.

But “you know what I am saying” is a wink, and a wink has never once held up in court. If a death looks like murder, I will stand right next to you demanding the investigation, and I mean that. I have been a medic and a paramedic. I know what a scene should look like, and I know when one doesn’t.

What I will not do is keep quiet while a sentence tells some 15-year-old that what he is feeling is impossible for somebody who looks like him. He will believe it. He will keep it to himself. And four words will finish what no mob ever had to start.

So no, I will not stop posting 988. I will stop when the slogan does.

— IF THIS ARTICLE MADE YOU THINK —

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COMMENT below with your take. Who checked on you when you needed it, and what did they say? Tell me.

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I Was an Army Medic. Now I Teach. Here Is How to Reach a Black Kid in 60 Seconds, Before “We Don’t Do That” Does.