Two deaths. Two very different reactions.
In the United States this month, Charlie Kirk a conservative activist and media figure was murdered while speaking at a university event. His killing was framed instantly as an attack on free speech, a national tragedy, and a political turning point. Tributes, condemnations, and fierce debates filled headlines, airwaves, and social media.
Around the same time, Demartravion “Trey” Reed, a young Black student in Mississippi, was found hanging from a tree on his university campus. Authorities quickly assured the public there were “no signs of foul play.” For Reed’s family and community, that phrase echoed a much older history of lynchings explained away, of silence masking racial terror. His death was not splashed across national screens in the same way. It was reported quietly, cautiously, as though his life did not carry the same symbolic weight.
And what of the countless others? The victims of America’s relentless gun violence shot in schools, on street corners, in their own homes whose names do not even make the evening news. They may not have been activists, they may not have been well-known, but their lives mattered too. They are mourned privately by families, barely acknowledged by the nation that failed to protect them.
The contrast is painful. Who is grieved, who is doubted, and who is forgotten tells us everything about power. Mourning itself has become political. Some deaths become rallying cries, others become statistics, others still are brushed away as inconvenient truths.
I care about this because I believe mourning should not be rationed. Because whatever our politics, our skin colour, our nationality, we are human beings first. Because bigotry in all its forms is not just un-Christian, it is inhuman. And yet everywhere I look, the language of free speech and patriotism is being twisted to excuse hate, to divide communities, to decide whose grief deserves space.
What is happening in the United States is not far from the United Kingdom. From protests outside hotels housing refugees, to Tommy Robinson marches, the same poison is spreading. We are being divided by race, by status, by ideology while the rich and powerful profit from our division.
Who deserves to be mourned? It is a question that surfaces every time tragedy strikes, and every time the answer is uneven. Mourning has never been neutral. It is shaped by race, class, gender, and by the political utility of a person’s death.
When Charlie Kirk was murdered, political leaders immediately rushed to frame his death as symbolic: a blow against free speech, an attack on democracy. Whether one admired him or despised his rhetoric, his killing was narrated as nationally significant. It was not just Charlie Kirk the individual who died, it was “the principle” he stood for or so the story went.
But when Demartravion “Trey” Reed was found dead, hanging from a tree on his university campus, the narrative was strikingly different. Instead of urgency, there was dismissal. Instead of grief, there was suspicion. “No foul play” was the official line, as though that could erase the racialised history of lynching in America. The silence surrounding his death was itself a form of violence one that denied his community the legitimacy of outrage, the legitimacy of grief.
And then there are the uncountable others. The children shot in classrooms. The women killed in domestic violence incidents. The Black and Brown teenagers caught in crossfire. Their names flicker across local news tickers before disappearing, absorbed into the endless churn of statistics. “Gun violence claimed another victim today.” Another number, another dot on the map, another life that will not be treated as national significance.
This is how mourning becomes stratified. Some deaths are made into symbols, others into cautionary tales, others into nothing at all. The question is not just who is mourned but how. To be mourned as a patriot, as a hero, as an activist is one kind of cultural immortality. To be mourned only within one’s family, invisible to the public eye, is another. To not be mourned at all to be erased, dismissed, denied the dignity of remembrance is its own cruelty.
This hierarchy of grief maps perfectly onto structures of power. White activists receive headlines, Black students receive caveats, working-class victims are buried under silence. When the state, the media, and the public decide who is worth mourning, they are also deciding whose lives mattered in the first place.
And it is not just about America. Here in the United Kingdom, I see the same stratification. When a refugee drowns in the Channel, the coverage is laced with suspicion why were they even here, why did they take the risk? Their death is rarely framed as tragedy, rarely honoured as human loss. But when a British holidaymaker dies abroad, the story is infused with empathy, outrage, and calls for change. Whose mourning counts is inseparable from whose belonging is recognised.
The politics of mourning is dangerous because it hardens us. It teaches us to ration compassion. It tells us some people “brought it on themselves,” while others are martyrs. It tells us some deaths deserve collective silence, while others deserve parades of tribute. It reduces grief one of the most human capacities we have to a political calculation.
We should be outraged at all of it. The activist shot dead on stage. The Black student found hanging from a tree. The refugee child lost at sea. The unnamed victims of street violence. All of them are human, all of them leave behind families and communities who loved them. To draw lines around who is worth mourning is not just unjust. It is an act of cruelty.
Whenever hate surfaces, defenders rush to cloak it in the language of “free speech.” It has become one of the most effective shields for cruelty. To call bigotry “just an opinion” is to strip it of its real-world consequences. To insist that every platform must host every voice, no matter how dehumanising, is to confuse liberty with license.
But free speech was never meant to be the freedom to harm. It was meant to protect dissent, to safeguard the ability of the powerless to speak against the powerful. Somewhere along the way, that purpose was twisted. Today, when slurs are shouted, when migrants are dehumanised, when Black students are mocked or disbelieved, defenders are quick to say: “This is free speech. Don’t censor me.”
The contradiction is stark. The same voices who defend hate as “free expression” are often the first to call for books to be banned, for protesters to be silenced, for journalists to be punished. Free speech becomes a selective principle, applied only when it serves the already powerful.
And it is not without cost. Hate speech is never just words. It creates an atmosphere in which violence feels permissible. We have seen this across history: racist rhetoric laying the ground for lynching, homophobic slurs laying the ground for attacks, Islamophobic lies laying the ground for harassment and worse. To pretend that words are neutral, that speech has no weight, is to deny centuries of evidence.
As a Christian, I cannot reconcile the celebration of bigotry with any notion of faith. Any bigotry is non-Christian. Any speech that strips dignity from another human being is not an act of freedom, but of cruelty. True freedom requires care, responsibility, and recognition of the other’s humanity. Without that, freedom curdles into license for hate.
The United States’ obsession with “absolute free speech” has spread across the Atlantic. In Britain, we see the echoes in Tommy Robinson’s marches, in protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers, in online campaigns against migrants and Muslims. Bigotry is dressed up as patriotism, cruelty is recast as courage.
And again, who benefits? Certainly not the ordinary people caught up in division, taught to see their neighbour as a threat. Certainly not the refugees demonised in the press. Certainly not the working-class communities fractured by scapegoating. The only beneficiaries are those in power — politicians, media moguls, billionaires who thrive on division because it keeps us distracted from their failures.
Free speech should not mean the freedom to dehumanise. It should mean the freedom to demand justice, to expose inequality, to name harm where it exists. Instead, we are left with a culture where hate is protected and humanity is optional.
The tragedy is that this is not inevitable. We could choose differently. We could choose a vision of free speech rooted in compassion, in dialogue, in a refusal to weaponise difference. But that requires us to stop confusing cruelty with courage. It requires us to stop excusing bigotry as “just opinion.” It requires us to hold the line: hate is not freedom.
When we strip back the layers of outrage, when we look past the headlines about migrants, protests, and culture wars, a troubling pattern emerges. Division is not just happening it is being manufactured. Hatred does not erupt spontaneously; it is cultivated, encouraged, and weaponised.
Take immigration. In Britain, refugees are blamed for long NHS waiting times, for housing shortages, for economic insecurity. In reality, these crises were decades in the making shaped by austerity, privatisation, and chronic underfunding. Yet instead of holding governments accountable, the anger is redirected toward those with the least power: the asylum seeker in a hotel, the migrant worker on minimum wage, the neighbour who speaks with an accent.
This redirection serves a purpose. When the public is busy arguing about whether migrants “deserve” beds in a hotel, they are not asking why billionaires are paying less in taxes than nurses. When communities are marching against refugees, they are not marching against the rising cost of living, unaffordable rents, or energy companies profiting off crisis. Division is a distraction strategy.
The United States operates on the same playbook. Gun violence is blamed on “mental illness” rather than the gun lobby. Police brutality is framed as a “few bad apples” rather than a systemic crisis. Communities are pitted against one another Black against white, migrant against citizen, poor against slightly less poor while wealth inequality deepens and corporations consolidate power.
And then there are the billionaires, the supposed champions of “free speech.” Elon Musk, for example, positions himself as a defender of liberty by owning social media platforms. Yet what does he offer the poor in the UK struggling with rent, or the miners and labourers in his homeland of South Africa still living in inequality decades after apartheid? Very little. His vision of freedom is technological, not human. It is designed for profit, not justice.
The truth is simple: divided societies are easier to control. If you are busy fearing your neighbour, you are less likely to notice who is hoarding resources. If you are conditioned to see migrants as the problem, you are less likely to see the role of corporate landlords, tax evasion, and government negligence. Division fragments solidarity. And solidarity is precisely what the powerful fear.
There is a cruel irony here. Many of the people scapegoated migrants, refugees, disabled people, those on welfare are also those holding society together through unpaid or undervalued labour. Migrant workers prop up the NHS. Refugees fill essential jobs in care homes. Disabled people, often excluded from formal work, still provide extraordinary care and resilience in their communities. Yet these very groups are painted as burdens, not assets.
This is not accidental. It is a political project. By defining some lives as “less deserving,” elites ensure that compassion is rationed. By creating categories of belonging citizen vs. foreigner, healthy vs. ill, productive vs. unproductive they turn care into a privilege rather than a right.
If we are ever to resist this, we must see division for what it is: a strategy of power. It is not migrants who cut social care budgets, not refugees who close libraries, not disabled people who inflate rent. Those decisions are made at the top. The anger belongs there, not at our neighbours’ doors.
Violence wears many faces, but its logic travels easily across borders. What happens in America rarely stays in America. The images of mass shootings, of young Black men killed by police, of students found dead under suspicious circumstances ripple outward, shaping how the world talks about race, justice, and belonging. And in Britain, those ripples are no longer faint they are tidal waves.
In the United States, gun violence has become its own kind of epidemic. Children learn lockdown drills before they learn multiplication tables. Families live with the fear that a supermarket trip or a night at the cinema could end in tragedy. And yet, despite the overwhelming evidence of systemic crisis, the political will to act is paralysed. Violence is normalised, explained away as the price of freedom.
In the UK, the violence looks different, but the logic is the same. Instead of mass shootings, we see organised hate marches. Instead of lynchings, we see targeted harassment of migrants, Muslims, and refugees. Instead of police killings in the same numbers, we see deaths in custody, the disproportionate criminalisation of Black youth, and asylum seekers scapegoated for societal failures.
The thread that connects these is the way violence is denied, downplayed, or reframed. In America, a Black student found hanging is labelled “no foul play.” In Britain, a refugee assaulted outside his temporary housing is written off as an “isolated incident.” The language of dismissal makes violence seem like anomaly rather than pattern. It hides the truth: these are not accidents, they are symptoms of deeper structures.
And the structures themselves are global. White nationalism is not confined to one nation’s borders. It is networked, organised, and emboldened by online platforms. The rhetoric that fuels a lynching in Mississippi is the same rhetoric that fuels a protest outside a migrant hotel in Yorkshire. The chants of “take back our country” cross oceans, translated but unchanged.
Social media amplifies this borderless violence. Platforms owned by billionaires claim to champion “free speech,” yet in practice they provide megaphones for hate. Lies about migrants “invading” Europe spread as easily as lies about Black voters in the United States. Conspiracies about “replacement” take root in both Mississippi and Manchester. Hate does not need passports; it travels at the speed of Wi-Fi.
Meanwhile, those most affected by this violence migrants, Black communities, disabled people, the poor are told to prove themselves worthy of compassion. Their grief must be justified. Their suffering must be exceptional to be acknowledged. This is how violence multiplies: not only through acts of harm, but through the silences that follow.
To see violence as borderless is to see our struggles as connected. The fight against racial terror in America is tied to the fight against migrant scapegoating in Britain. The call to end gun violence is tied to the call to end hate marches. None of these are separate battles; they are chapters of the same story.
And perhaps that is where hope lies too. Just as violence ignores borders, so too can solidarity. Communities in one place can learn from those in another. Activists in Britain can take courage from movements in America. Families mourning one kind of loss can recognise themselves in families mourning another. Violence without borders demands resistance without borders.
So we return to the question: who deserves mourning?
The truth is that every life lost whether through gunfire in America, racial terror on a campus, or the quiet neglect of refugees and disabled people in Britain carries equal weight in the eyes of humanity. Yet our societies have been trained to see grief through a hierarchy. Some lives spark outrage, vigils, and headlines. Others are explained away, buried in silence, or reduced to political talking points.
This selective mourning is not inevitable. It is a choice. And it is a cruel one. To grieve only when it is convenient, to defend only the lives that align with our politics, is to betray the very idea of compassion.
I am not naïve about the world we live in. Power has always sought to divide us, to ration our humanity, to make us think some lives matter more than others. The billionaires, the politicians, the media they thrive when we see neighbours as enemies, when we reserve empathy for some and suspicion for others.
But I refuse that script. I believe true freedom of speech is not the freedom to hate, but the freedom to love without fear. I believe compassion should not be rationed. I believe mourning should not be politicised.
When I look at America’s grief, when I look at Britain’s divisions, I see not only tragedy but warning. Violence knows no borders. And if hate can spread across oceans, so can care.
The question is whether we will choose it. Whether we will insist that every life lost to hate, neglect, or violence matters. Whether we will reclaim humanity from the calculations of power.
Because in the end, it is not free speech that defines us. It is how freely we love.
