Black Americans need to catch their breath

“I can’t breathe.” Those were some of George Floyd’s troubling last words before he died while being restrained by Minneapolis police officers during the course of his arrest on Monday. But they also accurately reflect my mental and emotional state as a black man in America.

I’m paralyzed by fear, and the truth is this anxiety has swelled within me for decades. It didn’t just surface this week, and I know I’m not alone.

Since these nationwide protests began, I was forced to examine when and why this anxiety started.

When was the exact moment I realized being a black man in America made me a threat to society?

Was it when I discovered there were two Americas, which happened when I was 20 during an internship in Boston back in the 1990s?

That was the first time I experienced racism on nearly a

weekly basis, in numerous forms. But the most common instance was when people in the Brookline community I lived in kept calling the police on me simply for walking to the train station.

Someone needed me to know I didn’t belong.

One woman nearly threw her baby in the bushes as I approached her while speedwalking on the sidewalk to catch the green-line train.

After that, anytime I had to pass someone in that upscale Massachusetts community, I did it in the street, leaving them the sidewalk.

I preferred the oncoming traffic over another run-in with police.

That experience prepared me for the countless other instances, when a woman would abruptly leave an ATM machine because I was waiting 6 feet away, or the numerous times I’d be pulled over by an officer and asked “Do you have drugs, weapons or a warrant?”

I was 30 when I discovered not everyone gets asked those questions and that not everyone is required to step out of their vehicle during a traffic stop.

It was routine for me because I was a black man in America, which means there’s obviously a price to pay for my skin color, my appearance.

Being black is like carrying a weighed vest on your back and never being allowed to take it off. And throughout the course of this week, I’ve discovered I no longer want to shoulder this load alone.

I’m exhausted, angry, scared and out of breath.

I can’t hide who I am, and even if I do — say by wearing a hoodie like the late Trayvon Martin, a Florida teenager killed in 2012 by a vigilante policing his neighborhood from society’s threats — it makes me even more suspicious.

Did you know a black man wearing a mask during this COVID-19 pandemic still gets a double-take?

Racism has been around for centuries, but it isn’t getting worse. These days it’s just getting filmed, so now people have proof minorities have been getting lynched by those charged to protect us.

And a video is our best route for justice, and even then the odds are still against us.

The sad thing is only people who look like me can truly understand this pain, the struggle, the journey we travel just trying to make others feel comfort with the hue of our skin or the locks in our hair.

“I don’t want to see stores looted or even buildings burn. But African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as flames burn closer and closer,” Hall of Fame NBA player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote in an editorial published by the Los Angeles Times this week. “Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere.”

And that’s why we can’t breathe.

Speaking up about it helps. Acknowledging that countless people of color have died at the hands of the police — or vigilantes like George Zimmerman, the man who killed Martin, or Gregory and Travis McMichael, the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery while he was jogging in a South Georgia neighborhood — is a starting point.

The protests in cities throughout the nation are a step in the right direction.

But the riots and looting that follow are destructive, because even if is white agitators triggering the mayhem, people of color know it’s us who will pay the ultimate price for it.

That just another way the oppressive, unfair system of our society demeans, discriminates and then profits off people of color.

It’s time to turn the volume up on those who are brave enough to speak out against racism and the social injustices that plague our country.

Whether it’s some of the many past or present law enforcement officials acknowledging that Minneapolis police acted criminally against Floyd; or Dolphins coach Brian Flores, who became the first coach or executive in the NFL official to make a statement on the deaths that that prompted these protests; or activists such as Abdul-Jabbar and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who continue to be a voice for the voiceless.

Actively listen to what is going on and how we feel, and then more importantly, turn your back on those who work to intimidate and silence us.

We need empathy and understanding for our experience, our burden, and maybe once we have it, we can finally catch our breath.

Omar Kelly