COVID, week 12 and George Floyd
Over the past 12 weeks now, I’ve been documenting in this teeny, tiny corner of the internet how COVID-everything has been turning life upside down and inside out, specifically here in SCC, in SJ, for my family and me.
And while COVID has most definitely dominated life as we know it for the better part of the past ~3 months, other stuff has been going on, too, of course, since life generally doesn’t wait for one catastrophe to clear before beginning another. Just a couple weeks back, I wrote about 25 year-old Ahmaud Arbery’s murder at the hands of white supremacists, a story that didn’t come to light until months after it happened. The gut-wrenching tragedy rocked the running community, myself included, and it has helped spawn subsequent conversations about race in the running world, a place wherein I spend a lot of my time in some capacity or another (be it actually doing the thing, reading or writing about it, or talking to people about it). Race is fresh on many people’s minds, some maybe for the first time.
And then, nearly three months to the day — February 23 to May 25, 2020 — yet another Black man, George Floyd, 46, was murdered at the hands of a white person, this time a police officer in Minneapolis, and like Mr. Arbery’s death, Mr. Floyd’s, too, was captured on video for all the world. In the subsequent days since Mr. Floyd’s murder, people have taken to the literal streets across the world, including here in SJ, to protest police brutality and this country’s long-standing, institutionalized racism towards BIPOC. Alongside the many peaceful protests have been unfortunate incidents of looting and vandalism, resulting in citywide curfews across the country (including here), and in some places, an activated military presence. Some people are focusing their disdain on the riots, looting, and vandalism. Others are on the aforementioned racism and invoking Dr. King’s prescient line that riots are “the language of the unheard.”
It is messy, it is complicated, there is literal loss and diminishment of human life, and this is all independent of COVID. COVID is only exacerbating the social stratification that’s a consequence of this country’s ingrained racism.
I’m not going to try to write anything eloquent here and say or reiterate things that have already been said, but from my point of view, it seems like a public reckoning on race is underfoot, which I’d argue is good. We can’t do anything to bring back Mr. Floyd or Mr. Arbery (or anyone else), but we can change the conversation — we can have conversations — about race in this country, and that’s a start. We owe it to ourselves. Dear god, we owe it to our kids.
Every human should be talking about this stuff right now, regardless of how uncomfortable it may make us feel (that’s ok; growth comes from discomfort) or whether we feel it’s applicable to us or not (it is; we’re human; even if we don’t identify as BIPOC, there is so much that we can learn from people’s personal stories [among others] that, in turn, we can use to make this world a better place for everyone). None of us has all of this figured out — none of us are perfect — and many of us, myself included, have come to the realization that even though we may abhor racism and consider ourselves allies, our passivity can make us complicit in this struggle.
In other words, none of us can afford to be anything but actively (vociferously) anti-racist.
Silence and inaction aren’t options anymore.
Please be well, take care of yourself (and someone else, if you can), and work toward making this world a better place for everyone.
sending love. xx
