I’m an abolitionist. My sister's a cop. And rethinking 'family' is how I am reconciling it all

I've struggled trying to hold what I know - that she would never intentionally hurt anyone - in tension with what I know just as deeply: this system of policing will always hurt Black people

In 2012, when Frank Ocean told me (yes, me, specifically) to imagine being thrown off of a cliff" in the Tumblr note he published before dropping the transformative Channel Orange, the same Tumblr note in which he admitted publicly for the first time that he had been in love with another man, I cried, and then I did, too. I admitted for the first time publicly - or at least for the first time to my parents - that I was queer in a three-page email.

The fall from that cliff was glorious for many beautiful moments - until I smashed head-first into the ground. Until my mother wrote back, three days after receiving my email, to tell me that all three pages were unacceptable and this was not what she raised me to be and - Ka help her! - my body, now lying mangled on the jagged rocks at the bottom of this hill I wanted to die on, was enveloped in sin.