This week has been particularly difficult because of what’s happened in the news. It’s like multiple stories in the news of horrific horrific violence and brutality against Black people in our country and this headline of George Floyd and I couldn’t bring myself to watch more than like a little bit of the video with the police officer with his knee on his neck suffocating him and murdering him.
This is all with other examples in just the last weeks with Breonna Taylor as well, and Ahmaud Arbery and as somebody who is white, you know, there’s a lot of weight and responsibility. So, you know knowing that there’s a lot to be done and where to begin and I have resources so I know how to take actions. I’m somebody who’s dedicated to this. At my current school I serve on a committee that’s trying to do anti-racist work. Anyways, I’m just thinking about everybody in my life who is Black American, a person of color.
So it feels like obviously we’ve been here before with so many other cases before but this feels different because of the fact that this is happening in this pandemic. I think is. One, It’s like ‘Here we go again.’ This is so awful, it was so egregious, the ten minutes of a knee on a neck.
But I think there’s something else that’s going on here, which is the Black community has also been so hard hit by COVID-19. Obviously in Detroit we’ve seen how that has played out. And so it’s already a time of extreme mourning and loss in that community and a time when you don’t really get to mourn the loss collectively in the way that we traditionally do because it’s a risk to other people’s Health to gather for funerals and Memorial services on top of that the number of people who have filed for unemployment and are waiting on checks to arrive from the government and so much economic despair.
It’s like everything is happening at once and it’s explosive.