Black Lives Matter

One of my favorite quotes is, “If there is a man lying in chains anywhere, none of us are free.” I do not know who to attribute this quote to but it nevertheless feels very appropriate in the heated climate of today. And as Maya Angelou said, “If you’re not angry, you’re either a stone, or you’re too sick to be angry. You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like a cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger, yes. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk. Never stop talking it.”

It is her words that inspired me to write this.

So much of my audience does not live in the United States, for those people, this post is about a black man named George Floyd who recently was horrifically murdered by a white police officer. The officer sat his knees on George’s neck and put so much pressure on him as George screamed that he could not breathe. Other officers watched as this happened and did nothing to stop it.

There have been protests throughout the country because of this incident, because this has happened, over and over and over again. Every time I see the footage on the news of these protests, I usually start to tear up. The government’s response to even peaceful protests has been to use tear gas and even violence.

I want to scream and I want to cry. That is how I feel about this situation.

At first, I thought it was odd that I would literally start crying every time I saw or heard anything remotely moving to me about this situation. Then it occurred to me that my response is evidence of my human nature. It is only natural to feel great emotion, it is only human to be moved to tears by racial injustice.

There is another part of me that feels rage, not just anger, but rage. I don’t condone violence, but I understand why some people were moved to riot. Martin Luther King said, “Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard.”

I am not African American, so I always want to check my own privilege. I don’t fear the police in the same way that black people do in this country. I don’t understand what it is like to have many of the men in my race either killed or put in jail by the time they are adults. Most of the prisons in this country are full of men of color.

I don’t fully understand the horror, the pain, the severe discrimination that African Americans face in this country on a daily basis. But I stand with them.

I’m not sure what I can do except vote out leaders who would try to quell even peaceful protest with violence, who do nothing to stop this kind of senseless violence from the police against an entire race. I don’t know what to do except say that I too recognize my own privilege as an upper-middle-class person of Asian descent. I don’t know what else to do except talk about it, write about it. I don’t know what else to do but to listen. Listen to people whose voices have been muted for centuries.

I recognize that I don’t fully understand, but I empathize. I understand that some rioters became violent because there is so much anger inside of them. Anger and suffering about a society that is criminalizing their very existence.

What gets me is that we have video coverage of this particular killing, but how many times do things like this happen that don’t get recorded? And what about the things that cannot be recorded on video, according to The New York Times, “There’s no video to show that blacks are dying from the coronavirus at more than twice the rate of whites, or that as a result of the recent mass layoffs is that, as of last month, fewer than half of African American adults now have a job.”

I saw a video about the things black men have to worry about, things like having a receipt if they leave a store, even if they buy a pack of gum so that no one thinks they have stolen it. I’m reminded of the time I left the drug store knowing full well that they forgot to charge me for a fifty-dollar electric toothbrush. I walked out of that store with absolutely no fear of retribution, no fear that even if I was accused of stealing that I would be in some kind of danger. No one would likely accuse me of stealing anything, people assume I’m smart and rich and well-behaved.

That is privilege.

Of course there are problems even with ‘positive’ stereotypes, but I literally don’t fear that people will fear me when I walk into a public space. Many, if not most, African American people must face this fear on a regular basis. Tears come in my eyes when I think about this too much. The problem is not that people trust me and treat me like a human being, the problem is that there are people walking around being treated like they are criminals because of the color of their skin.

Police brutality is a huge issue, but it is not by far the only issue. The criminal justice system that incarcerates people of color at an astonishingly larger rate than whites, the lack of equity in schools and employment are just a few other racial issues that black people must face in this country. If we are going to care about Black Lives, then we have to understand the magnitude of the situation. We must take a deep breath and take it all in.

We must listen.

We must listen to the voices of the unheard.

Even if you are not a person of color, even if you are not black, even if you don’t really understand, listen. Because what they are saying will remind you that even though you are not any of these things, you are human. None of our fellow humans deserve to live in fear of violence by the very government that was created to protect them. It is the utmost violation.

Oppression has so many forms. So many colors. And so do we.

Let’s examine these colors, not pretend they don’t exist. We all see color and we are all colorful.

Let’s paint a better picture.

nina

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