Until recently, I have not really understood the fear and uncertainty that Black people carry with them every day in this country. I (Margaret) grew up in Alabama, and I have always known that the police were more likely to arrest or even shoot an African American than they were to come after me. Each time I read in the news that Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Ataliana Jefferson, and all the others were killed, I was duly horrified.[2] I expressed outrage to my friends and on social media. We would speak of systemic racism and the school-to-prison pipeline.

I would see the sheer terror and pain in a father’s or daughter’s eyes and the horror of their experience would come into focus for a moment. It was like seeing a monster out of the corner of your eye. You turn, and maybe for a second you see the full, ghastly, seething, decrepitude of the thing. But then, the moment would pass. My world would get bright and secure again. I am white, after all, and I can be relatively sure that no policeman is going to shoot me or my children in my house because they think I might be a drug dealer. I can let my daughter walk in our backyard with her cell phone and not worry that a cop is going to shoot her seven times because he thinks she has a gun. The America that I read about in my history textbooks as a child is not that far off from the America that I have known.

But the truth is that America can be a scary place. Black and Brown and Indigenous people have to live all the time looking right at that monster. They always have to worry. White folk are living in a dream that is filled with being-able-to-rent-any-house-you-can-afford and getting-out-of-tickets-with-a-warning and sending-their-kids-to-the-“good”-public-schools. This may be their reality, but this is not America. America is a place where Black parents have to give their sons and daughters “the talk,” about how to walk out of your house without dying, and how, sometimes even if you do everything right, you could die anyway. They don’t get to glance away from this reality like I do, because this is their world. I am now finally realizing that this is the real America. This monster is what we as a nation really are. And let’s be clear; white folks built that monster, seeded it and fed it over centuries. Now we need to look at it, really look at it, and then kill it. America will be cursed until this is done.

I know that I am not saying anything new, but I need to say it anyway, if only because yesterday, while George Floyd’s senseless death was being mourned, four white men in New Jersey reenacted the death of Floyd during a BLM protest. “Blacks lives matter to no one, all lives matter, police lives matter. God bless the police. God bless the police. You dumbass protesters.”[3] That was their script. These men worked for New Jersey Corrections and FedEx. The good news is that they have since been suspended and fired, respectively.[4]

I hope that the momentum of this movement can lead to tangible results. On the other end of the political spectrum, and the other end of the country, late yesterday evening, protesters occupied Seattle’s city hall, led by Councilmember Kshama Sawant. As usual now, discussion was on police violence. “You about to lose your job!” They yelled at Mayor Jenny Durkan in response to her perceived failure to manage the Seattle police department. In a lovely example of memetic transfer, they took that chant from an online video that has recently gone viral. It shows a Black woman drunkenly singing, “You about to lose your job!” at a police officer while she is being arrested.[5] It is a great video, and it is awesome to see how quickly that could be reappropriated as a gesture of collective resistance. The situation is complicated by the fact that today, Durkan rebuffed Trump’s calls to manage the protests with force, telling him to “go back to his bunker.”

Notes

[1] Chad Brown, “Thoughts on the Killing of George Floyd,” Oregon Wild, https://spark.adobe.com/page/ZIIX3QNANCpnp/.

[2] Read more information on Martin, Gray, Jefferson, and many many others at Alia Chugtai’s earth shattering Digital Humanities project: “Know their Names: Black People Killed by the Police in the US,” Al Jazeera, https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2020/know-their-names/index.html.

[3] CBS3 staff, “New Jersey Corrections Officer Suspended After Caught On Camera Mocking George Floyd’s Death At Black Lives Matter Rally,” June 9, 2020, https://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2020/06/09/new-jersey-corrections-officer-suspended-after-caught-on-camera-mocking-george-floyds-death-at-black-lives-matter-rally/.

[4] Paul P. Murphy and Elizabeth Joseph, “All Lives Matter Protesters Re-Enacted George Floyd’s Death as a Black Lives Matter March Went By,” CNN, June 10, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/10/us/all-lives-matter-reenact-george-floyd-black-lives-matter-trnd/index.html.

[5] Malik Rogers (uploaded by), This Is Funny She Said You Were about to Lose Your Job, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SZUsA9sVMw.