In the light of the late George Floyd, there are many thoughts and feelings that I am unable to comprehend nor express following his murder. It is dehumanizing to witness the atrocities that police brutality continues to enact at the cost of lives. These atrocities are being smeared by words like, “mistake”, “misunderstanding”, and “accident”, as if adjectives are enough to bring back the lives they stole. As if adjectives are going to fill the voids left in people’s hearts following the murder of their brother, sister, lover, parent, or friend. As if adjectives are enough to cover up the blood police brutality has trailed beneath their footsteps for decades now. Does a riot have to happen every single time an innocent black life is taken for courts to recognize, try, and arrest the accountable for murder?
My city is one of many cities in this country right now burning in the name of George Floyd and many of the other victims of the systematic oppression this country profits from. A system that exploits the oppressed to paint a better image of themselves. A system flaunting a name tag stating “Land of the Free” while standing on the broken backs of minorities. The extent of the oppression that we see now is not new. It has not “gotten worse.” It is just now that we are beginning to see racism unravel so profoundly on various platforms in a country that claims to protect its citizens. A country that advertised its open doors for people running away from systems that were oppressing them, only to come to another that severs their hopes of acceptance, unity, and peace.
This is not the time to stay silent. This is not the time to plead neutrality in a matter in which lives are at stake. Innocent lives. Silence is betrayal. Neutrality is betrayal. Systemic racism and the exploitation of POC has been a long-standing, white superiority complex that is just now surfacing in the public eye. We are just now seeing it for what it is, to the severity at which it happens. There is no hiding. There is no secrecy. We see black men’s lives being stolen away from them every single day on any social media platform. We see POC losing their innocent lives in vain and abuse of power. Lives that had dreams. Potential. Goals. Families. Lives that didn’t deserve to end. No adjective in the world can describe the blatant ignorance of an institution who fails to acknowledge the #BlackLivesMatter movement and everything it stands for. All lives won’t matter if Black lives don’t matter.
I may not be black, and I may never understand what it is like to be black, but I hear their voices. I hear their pain. I hear their struggles and I hear their trauma. The innocence of victims have been ripped from their souls so powerlessly that is would feel wrong not to fight with them. This is not just their battle to fight alone, it’s a fight for all of us.
With that, it is time we speak. It is time we protest. It is time we fight, and fight, and fight until the voices of POC and minorities is so loud it shakes the Earth to its core. Until the knees of policemen shake and frames of the stations rattle. Until the walls of the White House echo the cries of men and women pleading for the justice they deserve.
To those the world has lost to police brutality, we do it for you. We do it in name of you. We do it for the generations after you, with the hope that we can bring change. Your names will not shrivel up in vain and they will amplify our voices so loud that the system can’t silence it. Say their names. Never stop saying their names.
Mel's Vision 