America is on fire today
By Ashley Elliott
8 minutes and 46 seconds. Disgraced ex-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin held his knee on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.
Floyd lay handcuffed and incapacitated, with his face pressed against the concrete pavement. In his final moments of consciousness, he breathlessly pleaded with the four officers who would eventually be responsible for his death. Repeatedly, he gasped that he could not breathe, but after 2 minutes and 53 seconds, Floyd, pinned under the weight of those officers mercilessly crushing his body, was rendered unconscious. The sudden silence and limpness of his body was jarring to onlookers who begged the officers to allow him room to breathe. However, they continued to dig their knees into his body for an additional four minutes. The crowd’s cries were not enough to convince these officers to relinquish their hold. Floyd’s decreasing heart rate was not enough to prompt these officers to take lifesaving measures. Minutes later, George Floyd was dead. His family requested a private autopsy that concluded his death was caused by “asphyxiation from sustained pressure” that eventually cut off blood flow to his brain. George Floyd was murdered on the side of the road at 46 years old.
Though details vary from incident to incident, the ending is always the same: a Black life is stolen by the police. This is a classic American story — one that this nation began writing hundreds of years ago. Racism, inequality, and dehumanization of Black people are central to its plot and are deeply ingrained into our law and our indoctrination as citizens. They are woven into the fabric of American culture and everyday life.
America is on fire today.
In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans all over the country are risking their lives to protest injustice and using all of the air that their lungs can hold to shout that they, too, can no longer breathe. In addition to combating a global health crisis, we are fighting the latest battle in our nation’s longest war.
America’s anti-Blackness was bred by the notion of white supremacy when imperialist Europeans crossed the ocean and introduced slavery to this land. Even to this day, its ideology is upheld by constitutional law. It has always been explicit. We often mention the Three-Fifths Compromise — this counted Black slaves as just three-fifths of a person — when discussing the history of systemic racism. With the ruling from Plessy v. Ferguson, separate but equal became the law of this nation, which effectively labeled Blackness as Other. Equally as damning and active to this day is the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, stating that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” With a simple signature, Blackness was criminalized, convict leasing became widespread, and mass incarceration of Black men began.
Historically, we have been marginalized and disenfranchised in the moments that affected our communities the most — the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the war on drugs under Reagan’s presidency, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Hurricane Katrina, the financial collapse of 2008, and 2020, as Black Americans lose their lives to COVID-19 at rates almost three times higher than their white counterparts. Black people are faced with the reality that there has yet to be one crisis, disaster, or emergency from which we could find safety, adequate protection, or refuge by relying on a government that was never designed to meet our needs.
America is on fire today.
However, the hard-to-swallow truth is that America has been burning for centuries — the smoke was just ignored.
There are no words that we can offer to erase the permanent damage done to the Floyd family or to fill the hole that George Floyd has left behind. There are no words that we can offer to comfort those who feel hopeless every time the country’s president publicly endorses violence against communities of color and dismisses systematic racism and injustice. There are no words to describe how it feels to watch your people suffer and die, over and over again. There are no words to explain how exhausting it is to exist in a country that blatantly discounts our humanity and worth.
The only thing worth words is the answer to this question: how will a nation divided and in crisis extinguish a fire that has been fueled since its inception? Critical race theorists have posed this question for years, but perhaps James Baldwin gave us the answer a long time ago in his “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” In this letter, he states the following:
“Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we — and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others — do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!”
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