Twenty-two year old Tiarah Poyau is not just another black girl who deserves a hashtag. She is me and every young girl across the country who has ever experienced the true problems of masculinity and its fragility in the black community. It doesn't matter what she may have did or said to make her killer angry, what matters is the fact that an innocent life was taken for simply saying no to what most college bound young men feel entitled to (which are dances from women at outings).
Tiarah took one moment and one night from her studies to enjoy some time with friends at Brooklyn’s West Indian J’Ouvert festival. She was later approached by her drunken killer, 20-year-old Reginald Moise, who began forcing himself on her by grinding to insist that she danced with him. Unfortunately, three words and one sentence ("Get off me.") triggered something in Moise that resulted in him pulling out a gun and shooting Tiarah above her left eye and forgetting the entire thing. Moise stated that he didn't even know the gun was loaded, which makes not only her death a mistake but also his actions a need for further investigation into the structure of masculinity and its social and cultural contributors.
The masculinity of black men is often tested and questioned in American society, which is shown through the media, their interactions among each other, and through their treatment of women. The fact that Moise felt the need to carry a gun to this festival says a lot about the world we live in today and the world that our ancestors have always lived in. Moise's gun represents the need for black men to feel safe and protected in all instances even if he is simply protecting his manhood. It also represents the way society has stereo-typically trained black men to operate mentally when they don't get their way. This idea of "protection" is what black men are socialized to be able to provide for their self and those that they care about. I'm sure Moise did not intend to use the gun for the alleged reason that Tiarah was killed for, but I'm also sure he owned this gun as a way to protect himself from the outside world and the problems he can not control as a "man".
Tiarah's life should be remembered a symbolic reminder of the underlying problem the black community faces internally. We are not only physically a threat to one another, but we are also threatening each other mentally. Tiarah did not deserve to lose her life and Moise did not deserve to be socially and culturally constructed in our country's deep sense of masculinity.
