On the George Floyd Protests
This is the least surprising event of all time.
It is comparable to repeatedly whacking a hornet’s nest with a stick or twisting a bull’s balls before he rampages into the matador’s arena.
Any living thing put under enough duress will trigger the innate fight-or-flight response that governs nearly all sentient life.
This is no different for us as human beings as the apex of life on this floating space rock, even with the numerous complexities that belie things. To narrow the focus down, this obviously applies to America and its history of racial injustice, from the Natives who were slaughtered and betrayed time and again, to the enslaved Blacks who quite literally built this country from the ground up.
Even having the fortune of living in the most human rights friendly era in humanity’s history, refined by countless years of ideological war, activism and trial and error, it is still so awful that people feel the need to respond this way in order for their voices to be heard. That the ingrained, systematic oppression and outright murder of their brothers and sisters by those sworn to protect them is not okay.
It is explicitly written in our country’s Constitution “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
I may have gone over this a little in previous posts, but putting things into a more personal context feels essential for the content of this post.
Yes, I am (obviously) a black man, born here in the US whilst being ethnically Nigerian.
I have the fortune of being born into a loving two- parent immigrant household who worked (and still work!) themselves to the bone in order to live in a cushy upper middle class suburb where the biggest issues police have to worry about is breaking up teenage house parties and drug abuse.
Even growing up, my encounters with racism were the comparatively milquetoast (yet still meaningful and harmful) stuff like expected to being good at sports, liking rap, and being shipped with the only couple other black girls at our school just because our skin was the same color.
Even now, with the exception of a certain episode in Missouri, all my personal interactions with police have been friendly and cordial. One of my best friends is a cop himself!
All of this goodwill and yet, for the rest of my living days, I will always have that mortal fear in the pit of my stomach whenever I interact with the police because with the figurative roll of the dice, I might end up encountering that/those cop(s) because of what I’ve witnessed in this country.
I’ve made my peace with it if it ever does happen, even if I would still be terrified. I can’t even begin the fathom the fear of people who have much more visceral experiences and claims with police brutality than myself.
Imagine for a second. To the average black person, what options do you think are left in their eyes? Peacefully protest? They are still doing this and rightfully so! But as I literally witnessed from the inside as a part of the NFL during Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protests, they’ll be met with disingenuous criticism about “disrespecting the flag”, even when that very flag itself was borne out of protest, VIOLENT protests I might add. Change things from the inside? We had an ACTUAL BLACK PRESIDENT, and even though it clearly wasn’t entirely his fault given opposition obstruction and the general limitations of the nature of federal/ state relations, it didn’t magically ease the racial tensions that have boiled within America like some believed it would that hopeful election night in November 2008.
(See concluding part on www.thisdaylive.com)
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” -John F. Kennedy