Black Lives Matter

On May 25, 2020, a man named George Floyd was murdered. He was Black. The officer who killed him in cold blood, pressing his knee on his neck for 8 minutes, 46 seconds, while George Floyd called for his mother, crying, “I can’t breathe,” was white. His death spurred a movement, and a revolution, that has been a long-time brewing.

In her first oral arguments before the Supreme Court, RBG quoted Sarah Moore Grimké, “I ask for no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”⁣ It was used as a metaphor about women’s suffrage.

But it was not a metaphor for George Floyd. In 1973 it was a metaphor for inequality. In 2020 it was murder.⁣
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I’m not surprised or shocked by what happened, and if you are, you haven’t been paying attention. I’m angry. I’m sad. I’m disgusted. I’m ashamed.

But this is not about my feelings. It is not about me, and making it about my feelings, changes the narrative yet again, to a white one.⁣ I won’t do that.
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What I will do, and have been trying to do, is listen, both to Black people in my real life, that I know, love and admire, and on the Internet. I am learning.

I am not asking the Black people my life, “What can I do? What should I be doing?” That’s not their job. It is mine. It’s ours.

They’ve been doing the work. The work is out there. The information is out there. I will find it, and constantly seek it out.

I’m learning. I’m acknowledging. There is so much learning, so much acknowledging, that needs to be done about how we got here, and the behaviors that we knowingly and unknowingly engage in every single day to add to the oppression. I’m going to have difficult conversations with friends and family. I’m going to make racism a part of the conversations in my home with my boys. I’ll vote. And I will work toward being actively anti-racist every day.