A woman asleep in her bed, murdered in a home invasion. When the murderers are police and the woman is Black, there is no justice for Breonna Taylor; her death wasn’t even for a minute considered to be wrong. I have seen memes and twee graphics, her name bandied about as a way to be clever and woke. What I have not seen is regret, empathy, remorse, apology, restitution. What I have not seen, and what will not be handed out to us or to her, is justice.
When we talk about abolition, we talk about ending the conditions that lead to crime. When those crimes are the police themselves, it is the police who must end. They will not police themselves after they kill Black women in their beds, Black men in the streets. They will never stop. They are a racist scourge on this country and until they end, they will continue to end us without consequence or care.
Today I am neither surprised nor shocked. I have been and remain angry. I hope that anger will fuel change, I hope all our righteous anger will ride us and not let us stop until we end this system of racist murder with impunity. Defund, abolish, call it whatever. It has to stop.
Two hundred days. I don’t know why increments of ten are compelling here, as they don’t align with the weeks, months, or (I suspect) years that we will be doing this. Still, two hundred days seems like a long time, even more in light of the way the days and weeks are slipping by. We have acclimated to living in a pandemic even while thousands of people die each day, to a degree that is a bit mind-boggling. It seems like just last month that I was writing about Day 100, that I was marveling at how the weeks were running into one another. Blink, another 100 days. Blink, another 150,000 dead.
This week I’m thinking about what’s coming. For months, I’ve lived as much in the present as possible, trying to neither wallow in yearning for the past nor fear of the future. Foot in front of foot, day by day, sleep when I can, cook what I have to, read as much genre fiction as I need to numb my racing thoughts. Repeat repeat repeat. However, the seasons are changing, school is in session, winter is coming. All of it demands an assessment of where we are and where we’re going, a recommitment to principles, a recalibration of the machine.
First day of autumn. It feels significant, probably only to me and my addled sentimental brain, that the first day of this delightfully cool season aligns with our two hundredth day of pandemic distancing. This is when I would be taking stock of what needs to be done before winter, getting the cars repaired and the house battened down, calculating how much time in the weeks I have for my work now and determining what I want to do with that time. All of that is happening, but I was jolted into a realization that I need to take stock of our pandemic planning as well.
Winter is coming (har har, yeah) and it’s not going to be good. There is no way for it to be good. There is no vaccine coming to save us; the virus travels better (farther, faster, longer) in cooler drier air; indoor spaces become more dangerous; outdoor spaces become less available; and all of us want more than anything else to start being with other humans again in close contact. (Don’t we? I know I do.) I am looking at our plan to pod (bubble, quaranteam, whatever cute phrase we’re using) with another family like ours–one kid, two parents based at home, no family in the area, similar protocols for shopping–that seemed very reasonable over the past three months we’ve been discussing it and wondering if maybe I’m being completely stupid and we’ve lost our ever-loving minds. We undertook these UN-level negotiations out of a desire to have someone for our child to play with in the winter, to have other adults to converse with in the dark months, to have people other than the three of us to share a meal or a board game with as this drags on, et cetera. The lovely cool weather that I’m reveling in this week will ultimately mean we can’t all lounge in the yard for much longer.
I know that all of our choices are about managing risk, balancing the chance of dire health consequences down the line with the reality of negative health consequences accumulating every day this goes on. I’m not good at trusting other people, and even though I believe I’ve found another family as paranoid and mistrustful as I am (just kidding, but really), there’s no guarantee. No sure thing. Our brains and our moods are going to start urging us to take more risks because this has gone on so long and we’re struggling. Maybe that restaurant is okay (it’s not) or that BBQ will be fine (it won’t) or church will be good if we sit apart (nope again). Not that I’m planning to do any of these things, but the things we are doing–biking outdoors with other families, relying on distancing but not also masks for yard chats, bubbling up–seem reasonable to me. Maybe they’re just as ill-advised. Basically, my brain is locked in a cage match between I’m sure this one thing will be fine and WILL THIS BE HOW WE ALL DIE.
I have no answers. There is no conclusion. When I make it to the check-ins that are still a saving grace of this whole situation, many of us like to end with be safe, stay strong. Hold the line. Distance, mask, don’t hang out indoors. But as winter approaches, I really want to know that people living alone have a plan to get through it. I don’t want to advocate for podding, because who the hell knows if it’s safe, but I do want to hope that everyone has someone they’ll be able to hug this winter, some way, somehow. Please don’t crack and go to a bar and then the movies because you just can’t take it anymore. I really don’t want you to do that. We’re looking at another year, though, which is a long time. I really want us all to live through this, hearts and brains intact.
Ten years ago, I went into labor three weeks early and twenty-four hours later, my heart was living outside my body. My child was born at 11:58 at night; once, I suggested maybe we should have had their birthday be the next day and my partner said, “Absolutely NOT, you were in labor literally the entire day, that is their birthday!” So. That is their birthday.
It is the most bizarre thing to grow another human being, to look upon someone and know that they once were just a group of cells inside you, and that you had to generate an entire additional organ solely to sustain their growth. So much growing, and then those cells become a being capable of independent life, which is maybe the most bizarre part of all. It only gets more surreal as that life that is initially so dependent grows and changes, walks and runs and bikes and swims, becomes truly an actual whole different person whom it is a joy to get to know.
I’ve had a decade to get used to having grown a whole entire person and I still marvel at it sometimes. Look at what my unreliable and prematurely aged body did! In the old stories that our child’s Waldorf preschool told, children wait in the spirit world until they spot the people they want to be their parents and then cross the Rainbow Bridge to join them once they’ve made their choice. I love this story, because it makes me reach for whatever there could possibly be inside me that called this lovely amazing beautiful surprising spirit who is my child into being.
Ten days after giving birth, I sat on the side of our bed and cried my eyes out because I realized that this tiny baby, whom I had just barely gotten to meet, would one day grow up and leave me. Which is, of course, exactly what every parent wants, a healthy well-adjusted independent child, but it was devastating to imagine then. My partner said, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves: they’ve only been here for ten days. We have time.” Ten years have gone by in the blink of an eye and it’s true that it’s a little easier each day to raise them to be ready to leave me, as doing so means we are privileged to witness them grow into who they are, a little bit more deeply each day. And who they are is absolutely perfect. I may have brought this child into the world, but I am only along for the ride.
Today marks six months of pandemic living. Weeks of full quarantine, months longer of modified quarantine with masks. Truthfully, our family is still as isolated as we can be while balancing the risk of contracting a deadly virus and the strain on our mental, emotional, and physical health. What’s the old pop punk line? I’m not sick but I’m not well. We grocery shop, we work from corners of our home, we read, we write, we walk, we bike, we see our friends at a distance, in masks. We grieve, we worry, we overeat, we undersleep, we bicker, we grouse.
In the last six months, we have spent more time together as a family of three than ever before. I have been based at home since my child was born, first as a parenting choice in the early years and then as a necessity in recent ones, when my aches and pains became first a chronic illness and then a disabling condition. Never in those years, beyond the initial weeks when my partner was on parental leave, has our child spent so much time with both parents present. Never has my partner been available for eating and walking or biking over lunch. Never have we been able to rise, eat, and prepare for the day at our own pace. Never have we had dinner together so regularly (and when I think of my partner coming home from work and eating meals alone late at night all those years because I fed our child hours earlier, the loneliness breaks my heart). There is no commute for any of us.
We are all here together in a structure that is the most relaxed it has ever been for our family and we are under strain we never could have imagined bearing and surviving. All day, every day, we function in the face of unrelenting stress. The stress of keeping a job, making decisions at that job that impact the lives of other people who are similarly trying to keep a job while making decisions that impact the lives of other people. The stress of monitoring local, county, state, national, and international events, to know what is mandated and what is recommended, to find the path where we survive a deadly pandemic and determine if and how we can walk it. The stress of worrying about every single person we know and love, and every single person they know and love, all around the country and the world. The stress of managing how much we know about wildfires and police brutality and neo-Nazi violence and voter suppression and poverty and hunger and homelessness and refugees and abuses of power and relentless deadly racism. The stress of determining how much of that is necessary for our child to know, in what ways and to which degrees, before or after they hear garbled versions of current events from classmates and friends. The stress of not crying, of finding somewhere private to cry, of getting out of bed each day while wanting to not get out of bed again until it’s over. The stress of knowing that it will never be over.
Six months. I will keep counting the days, weeks, and months since this began. Since we came home and stayed. I will do this partly because I am a nerd and making notations soothes me, and partly because I have always been attuned to dates and the passage of time, to anniversaries and the arrival of days where I feel off for no reason and then remember, ah, yes, that, then. I know that many more people have been at work and in school, in and out on different timelines throughout this year. I know that things will get worse before they get better, if they ever get better at all. I know that the day we came home from work and school and stayed was not the beginning, and I know that the day we line up to be vaccinated and return to our school and office buildings will not be the end.
Six months, ten years, a lifetime. Whatever the meaningful increments are: we’re still here.
After a high school friend remarked upon the thirty year anniversary of Ritual de lo habitual last week, I realized that 2020 is the thirty year anniversary of, hands down, the best year of my teenage life. Not that any stretch of being a teenager is wholly trouble-free, but even then I remember feeling like being fifteen in 1990 was pretty great. Was I primed to enjoy it so much by my childhood obsession with Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen, an early and perfectly perfect incarnation of the now-ubiquitous teen romance? Maybe. If so, I thank the book for preparing me to not miss a thing.
Thirty years ago, I had goofy friends, and the slightly older ones among them could now drive us places: diners, movies, each other’s houses. We had jobs, in places where we all wanted to be. The local pools, the pizza place with an arcade upstairs, the skate shop, the thrift store; we worked, and then we went to where our friends worked and hung out. We stayed after school for hours together, in the darkroom, rehearsing the school play. On the weekends, we gathered and performed for each other, in bands, at open mics. We spent days and weeks doing things like building skate ramps or setting up rehearsal spaces in garages, and then we spent days and weeks watching each other use them.
That year, thirty years ago, we all got crushes on each other and failed to realize that other people had crushes on us. We drove around en masse, in the beds of pickup trucks, crammed into hatchbacks or the massive back seats of our parents’ old cars. We wore amethysts on chains around our necks, drew on our Chucks, wore holes in our Vans, and kept the local record stores in business. That year, I fell in love for the first time, went to my first major concert, had my first job with responsibilities. I found my taste in music and in people; the people I laughed with then are the people I laugh with now, new friends who feel like old friends and my friends from back then who still crack me up over text. We lay around on each other’s couches, floors, beds, and porches at all hours of the day and night. Listening to Ritual, yes, but that year also gave us Flood, Social Distortion, Goo, Bossanova, A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, the Twin Peaks soundtrack, the only song I know of written for a girl with my name, and so much more. At that time, I still had the few close friends of my youth around me, kids who liked me when I was plump and awkward, while I was discovering a new group of punks, theater geeks, skaters, and weirdos to love.
That summer I was fifteen, we spent three weeks with my grandparents in Ontario. The boys who lived across the street were instructed by their mother to entertain me, as a favor to my grandmother. I was right in the middle of their ages, and the older one could drive. They let me swim in their pool, watch Spinal Tap and listen to Queen with them in their basement, and tag along when they went downtown to the annual waterfront carnival and fireworks. I manufactured a crush on the older brother’s best friend, Marco, a kid who looked like he should be in a boy band and was so authentically Italian his foyer contained four kinds of marble and his mother tried to feed us something every time we stopped by to pick him up. In the afternoons, I read on the porch and taped songs off Detroit’s alternative rock station, something we didn’t have on the radio back home. At night, I pulled my grandparents’ kitchen phone through the accordion door and sat on the floor by the dining room table to talk to my friend Jay. I told him all of the nothing I was doing in Ontario and he told me all of the nothing that was happening in Indiana and made me miss it less.
When I watch the lifeguards at our pool, flirting and joking and being stunningly happy in the way that only teenagers at their summer jobs can be, I can’t believe how much time has passed. The year I was fifteen, I was more entirely myself than I can remember feeling during any other single year of my life. So many other years and time periods blur together, but I can remember 1990 so vividly, could tell you what I was doing and whom I was doing it with almost month by month. So many places and faces, so much of the time spent laughing until our sides split and tears ran down our cheeks. We were young enough to still enjoy being ridiculous, old enough to know there wouldn’t be very many more years of jumping off the roofs of sheds into backyard pools or sneaking up onto the roofs of our schools without turning into the sorts of townies we heard cautionary tales about.
Thirty years ago, most of the pain and grief and heartbreak of our teenage lives was still ahead of us. We hadn’t yet broken each other’s hearts, or lost friends to suicides and addictions, hadn’t had to make choices about abortions and marriages. We hadn’t destroyed or lost friendships, made relationship-ending mistakes. We weren’t yet judging each other for our choices to leave or stay, to change or remain the same. All that was still to come, but before it did, we had an amazing year together.
Yesterday, I told my physical therapist that it feels like there’s nowhere to rest my eyes. Locals, news, obligations inside our family, even the blue light from the screen that gives me eye strain while I’m trying to relax and watch what turned out to be an uninspiring Pump Up The Volume knock-off. Nature was the answer I got, look to nature. Everything else is a dumpster fire.
I peer into the overgrown corner of the garden from the window by my desk. Watching the grapevine grow ever higher was stressing me out until last week when a medium small rabbit popped out from that section of the yard. Just yesterday, I spotted a house wren in the branches, staking out its territory from the more aggressive and ubiquitous Carolina wrens who live here. Years of time, money, and labor invested in the native gardens surrounding the house and bordering the yard are showing their value this year. While we’ve been low on butterflies, we’ve had more types of birds nesting (or bringing the young ones here to feed) than I can remember in past years. We were the regular hunting ground of the block’s mama fox and we have a rabbit who’s claimed the clover patch and is a nightly visitor. With the successful relocation of the overcrowded winterberries, I hold out hope that this fall will give the birds a bumper crop of berries.
Nature isn’t enough, though. While I’ve deleted Twitter from my phone, I can’t bring myself to turn fully away. There is human tragedy, policy failure, and societal collapse playing out in real time all around me. I feel it even when I’m not looking. I don’t need to witness all the things, every minute of every day, but I can’t ignore it all. Too many friends are teachers around the country being ordered to risk their lives; too many people I know are losing family members or being permanently incapacitated by this virus; too much is at stake. Also: I can do nothing about it except make the best choices for our family and community. All we can ask of each other is to survive.
Because nature isn’t enough, I have also been attending as many book talks as I can online. Crowdcast has become a lifeline for me, connecting me to writers and thinkers around the country who are having conversations about important things that are not always this wildness we find ourselves in the midst of. My favorite bookstores are still hosting readings, and I am able to attend more of them virtually than I ever did in person.
This is a low energy time of year. I remind myself. Every year we hit an August slump. Also, we are living in conditions of chronic stress, experiencing increased depression and spikes of anxiety. This is not the time to expect much. Just survive. If you can, find a place to rest your eyes.
Thirty more days. Blink and a month went by. It got hot here, ushering in the time of year when I always start losing days to the fog of achy joints, migraines, and a generally sluggish pace of life. We’re still here, it’s just summer.
As the country goes off the rails, we have small bits of light. Our garden is home to young birds of many varieties: cardinals, robins, song sparrows, catbirds, wrens, woodpeckers, grackles, starlings, crows, a towhee. We watch them flop their way around the shrubbery as they grow wings; they catch moths and beetles in the grass and then, startled by their success, fly back to their parents to learn what to do next. Young rabbits slide under the gate and lounge in the clover, munching on flowers and then wriggling in the dust patch. A chipmunk appears inconsistently, darting so many places that it’s impossible to tell where it lives. There is so little to do, so we watch nature in real time, calling each other to the window to see the unremarkable yet always exciting appearance of one small creature or another.
My partner is still working from home, keeping us all in shelter, food, and books. The child and I fill our days with summer things, reading and watching cartoons, rousing ourselves reluctantly to cook dinner. (About which I regularly think, Every day? Really? Still?) Even before the pandemic arrived, we had decided to try a camp-free summer, after a school year that included, for the first time, evening swimming and after-school chorus. Then, after a spring of online meetings and homework submissions, the idea of online camp didn’t appeal at all. Instead, we lounge.
In the spring, we worked hard week after week to weed, edge, and prune the yard into something resembling a purposeful garden. We left a bit of wildness in the country style, plants spilling into each other whenever the crowding doesn’t create issues with mildew and rot. (It is, after all, a southern swamp here, no matter how much I’m striving to create a bucolic northern copse.) Now, we have only one patch of garden that didn’t get attended to before the temperatures rose above 90F and therefore won’t until they drop again. Now, we water the shrubs from the rain barrels and keep the birdbath filled with fresh cool water. We venture out as little as possible.
It seems irresponsible that a month has passed in this way, but what else could we do? We have also cautiously participated in swim team four mornings a week. I have gone to the store twice. We acquired frozen lemonade from the local coffee shop once, yesterday. I have attended online book talks, taken a writing course, participated in a scholarship committee. All of that is only as much as I would do in a typical month of summer, so I suppose it is enough. Throughout, we give to bail funds. We give to protest groups. We give to immigrant advocates. We give to support neighbors who have lost houses, jobs, family members.
won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.
One hundred days of quarantine. I will not make the obvious reference, but if I were to draw a parallel, you should know that I have always preferred Love In the Time of Cholera. Still we are here. We work, play, create, rest. In the first half of this month, I created a comic zine (my first!) about my vivid pandemic dreams, so my subconscious rolls on. On to the next 100 days, or at least into summer. We have weathered the longest day, now let the lazy ones begin.
Despite our neighbors no longer making even a pretense of distancing and businesses opening up, nothing fundamental has changed in the context of the pandemic so nothing will fundamentally change in our family’s practices either. We will wear masks, keep physically distant from people outside our family, undertake necessary shopping trips only, and have limited controlled interactions with friends. No restaurants, no cookouts, no cleaning people. Just us, the outdoors, and what we need to survive.
What do we need to survive? Food, shelter, income, things to read, and contact with others, certainly. I appreciate those people I see walking with friends (with masks) and having distanced yard dates (with masks). I know that this situation is particularly hard for extroverts who live alone, and we need to interact. I’ve started seeing my acupuncturist and PT again, on a much reduced schedule, because my function was decreasing and my pain increasing to a degree that I wasn’t okay with. My hair, though, will look all manner of wild for as long as it takes, as I won’t be using some of my limited tolerance for coming into close contact with others on getting a haircut. (Nor the dentist, so I’m grateful for all the care and repairs my teeth have received over the past three years.)
Today we celebrated Father’s Day with the resources at hand. Big bunches of hydrangeas from the yard, handmade cards with personalized coupons included, and a brunch fit for the awesomest parent in the entire world. All we need is right here.
Leading up to Juneteenth, I have been thinking a lot about time. Specifically, the way that racism steals time from Black people’s lives. In the crudest most extreme way, racism kills Black people, cutting off years of living. Even when people are not killed prematurely at the hands of the police state or through the disparate impacts of poverty, environmental pollution, and medical malpractice, Black people have minutes, hours, months, and years siphoned out of their lives.
Take Juneteenth. On top of the centuries of free living that enslavement stole from Black people, the specific white supremacists of Texas stole another 2.5 years. We celebrate Juneteenth as a recognition that before that day, there was no national “independence” in the United States. But it’s more complicated than that. As laid out here, in many parts of the country Black people were enslaved until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified. Black people were prevented from moving freely, keeping them from leaving the locations of their enslavement and empowering white supremacists to continue to steal years of their lives. People were freed, but their time was still being taken by institutionalized racism.
I absolutely support Juneteenth and love that more people are learning its history. (I was today years old when I learned that August 1st, the generic bank holiday my Canadian family has appreciated as a day off my whole life, is a commemoration of the date enslavement ended in Britain and its remaining colonies.) I have encouraged its celebration in our family and community as an alternative to the gagging nationalism of the Fourth of July for a number of years now, as an exultation of Black freedom and a recognition of Black struggle. I agree with the premise of The 1619 Project, that the United States–and the creation of “white” and “Black” USians–is inseparable from enslavement and amassing of wealth extracted directly from Black lives. There is no other place like this in the world, no other country where we have created ourselves in this way. Yes, white Europeans violently colonized practically the entire world. Yes, Black and brown people have been, and continue to be, brutally oppressed in the aftermath of that colonization. Perhaps it is a truism that it is not done anywhere else the way it is done here, something that everyone everywhere can assert.
Still, though. There is something to the USian way that is insidious and endures. Even now, every day, racism is stealing Black people’s time. Poor and working people spend hours navigating bureaucratic black holes, with absolute disregard for their time. Working and middle class people spend hours in transit, residential segregation structuring landscapes where it is nearly impossible to live near where one is able to find a job. All Black people have their time siphoned off in small bits here and there through dealing with interpersonal aggression and the conciliation of well-meaning white people at work, in neighborhoods, in their children’s schools. How many hours of their life is any given Black person trapped waiting through white tears alone?
It is undeniable that the creation of white wealth in this country stems directly from Black lives. We should all give what we can to racial justice efforts, to bail funds and youth organizers; to legislative lobbying for racial justice in education, community safety, and work; to mutual aid projects like housing, clothing, and feeding community members. We should donate toward the safety of Black trans people, whose very lives and existence, Angela Davis reminds us, challenge our assumptions of “normalcy” and expand the range of what we imagine to be possible. We should pay and pay and pay, as individuals and as a country.
What we should also do is value Black people’s time. Consider the ways in which we demand it, the ways in which we waste it, and the ways in which we fail to consider it at all. We should educate ourselves, rather than siphoning that learning from Black people, but we should also know that while we use the luxury of our unconstrained time to read books, Black people are dying. We should absolutely reflect and acknowledge our racist wrongs, the times we have called a neighbor by the wrong name or chosen not to see how mistreatment by a racist medical system created conditions of illness or stress for those in our community. We should then refrain from sucking the time of our Black neighbors and colleagues in seeking absolution. We should push for streamlined and transparent bureaucratic processes, fully staffed government offices and public libraries, frequent and extensive public transportation, and direct aid whenever necessary. Because ALL Black lives matter, and we continue to steal lives when we steal time.
More than anything, we should be vigilant about how we can do better next time. Because there is always always always a next time.
It’s the tenth straight day of ever-growing protests against police brutality across the United States and around the world. It’s our 86th day of coronavirus distancing. Everything feels simultaneously like too much and not enough.
As I’ve watched the street protests grow and grow and grow over the past ten days, I’ve been holding my breath. Waiting for the wave to break. Waiting for people to be intimidated back into their homes, for the numbers to dwindle down to a core of activists blocking highways, as has happened in the past. For the nice white liberals to change their profile pictures, post their beautifully graphically designed slogans, and go back to their lives. That’s how it’s gone every other time there’s been an outcry about a police murder of a Black person, a peak of interest and outrage and then a retreat, leaving me the lone voice of an angry sociologist ranting into the wind of the suburbs once more.
This time feels different. This time, coronavirus has already disproportionately decimated Black communities with job losses and deaths of family members. People have nowhere to go and nothing to do, nothing left to lose by being in the streets. At the same time, white people are home as workplaces and schools close, with nowhere to be and nothing to do to distract from the images of police violence and the voices of Black people. This time, it is harder to turn away, and we are all emotionally open in a way we have not collectively been in a long time.
What I see is not a dwindling, but a joining. I hear racist oppression and institutional violence named and described in the public discourse with a clarity and consistency that has not happened before in my lifetime. In the past I have heard endless cries of “why don’t they wait, why don’t they lobby”; this time, I’m hearing “of course people are angry, why shouldn’t they act.” I am not the only one in my neighborhood pushing back, I am not the only one arguing for action. Maybe these years since the murders of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and thousands of others have mattered, maybe all of these various actions have made a difference. Maybe the accumulation of grief and anger in the spirits of white people has been happening in ways that haven’t been visible. Maybe, finally, we have reached a tipping point that will contribute to meaningful change in our systems.
I have a friend who works in international conflict resolution, and we sometimes argue about non-violence. I am not a pacifist, as much as I might aspire to be, and the arguments are usually about the social value of punching Nazis. My friend really is a pacifist at heart, and it grieves him to put more violence into the world, even if that violence might be necessary to push back fascism. When we talk about what it means to be non-violent in the face of racist state violence, I remember that the non-violence of Dr. King was always a strategy, a way of exposing white supremacist violence without being blamed for provoking it. When TV news broadcast footage of police officers beating and hosing protesters, of angry white mobs attacking Black students at sit-ins, the truth of those images was impossible to deny. There was no way to turn away, not without the shame of knowing that you were taking the side of the oppressor. White people acted because the violence of other white people was both undeniable and unconscionable, and they wanted to stand outside of it, not because they recognized in the non-violence of Black people something they had failed to see before.
This week, I have seen dozens of videos of cops attacking protesters and journalists. Opening fire with tear gas and rubber bullets, beating with batons, kicking and shoving people to the ground, ramming with bicycles and shields. People have been blinded, permanently and temporarily. At least one person has died after being sprayed full in the face, others have been shot to death. Whatever guidelines departments have in place, police have uniformly failed to follow them. None of these behaviors are isolated or unusual: when the cameras roll, the violence follows, in every city around the country once the daytime marchers with children go home, and sometimes before. As someone quipped on Twitter, “The amount of police brutality at the anti-police-brutality marches is proving a lot of points.”
This, then, is what the protesters are achieving: they are putting their bodies into the streets as the foil against which the intractability of police brutality will become undeniable. We are seeing these videos as they happen live on TV and the internet; they are being archived and rebroadcast, catalogued and used to challenge the city and county councils who have been so accommodating of this violence over the decades when the police have received more money than education, transportation, and health services. People are no longer willing to pay for this, no longer willing to believe that more violence makes us safer, no longer willing to accept the cops who stand by and do nothing as “good,” no longer willing to stand apart as those who are protected from the ones the police beat, no longer willing to have this done in our names or under the guise of keeping our children safe. We want all our children to be safe, we want our “we” to encompass those Black and brown people whom the police have treated as disposable for too long. We who cannot march need to keep pushing our officials, keep donating money to bail funds and to local organizations who have been doing this work for years.
We have allowed this by looking away. We are not looking away now.