For Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, For Us

When I first started writing this, my mind was consumed with thoughts hours before an arbitrarily important milestone in my life — my 25th birthday. On the eve of my birthday, the nation was consumed with the news of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Georgia native. Arbery, who was simply jogging, was executed by a racist father-son duo who obviously took offense to his being in their neighborhood and criminally overstepped the jurisdiction of private citizens. On the eve of my 25th birthday, it was not lost on me that another 25-year-old Black male was murdered simply for his race, that in another lifetime, or even in another situation, that could have easily been me, and that unfortunately, little has progressed in our country since I was say — 16 years old. When I was sixteen, Trayvon Martin was murdered by George Zimmerman in Florida walking back from the store with snacks in his hands. He had been watching the 2012 NBA All-Star Game, just like I most certainly had been. He was 3 months older than me and had just turned 17 years old. Arbery’s murder is the most similar murder to Martin’s in the last decade, as Arbery was seemingly minding his own business, whilst being Black, and murdered by an individual that felt threatened by the blackness of a young Black male and took it upon themselves to cosplay as the police. Nine years have passed since Trayvon Martin’s murder, an event that had a powerful impact on every young Black person my age, and now more than ever, it has become abundantly clear that not only has little changed, but it’s helplessly naive to believe that anything ever will at this current rate.

The original basis of this piece was nothing more than pure anger. I was upset by social media posts meant to “spread awareness” of Mr. Arbery’s death. I had seen the same for Trayvon Martin’s death, and Mike Brown’s, and Tamir Rice’s, and Sandra Bland’s, and Walter Scott’s, and Freddie Gray’s, and Eric Garner’s, and Jamar Clark’s, and Rekia Boyd’s, and Laquan McDonald’s, and Anton Sterling’s, and Philando Castile’s, and Botham John’s, and Korryn Gaines’s, and yet — nothing had changed. The idea that the same politicians that have helped to facilitate the state of today’s racial injustices use these very tragic incidents as a Twitter checkpoint, but do little to stop it in their positions of power, infuriates me. The fact that Black celebrities must risk their entire livelihoods to protest these injustices is ridiculous.

When I first started writing, I was pissed off that yet another one of these murders was captured on film. When the Black Lives Matter movement nobly demanded that policemen across the country wear body cameras and encouraged people to film potential encounters in an effort to hold the police accountable, I’m sure the intention wasn’t for murders to simply be streamed thousands of times on Facebook Live, Twitter, and Instagram while police accountability remained at pitifully low levels. Our lynchings are available for the world to see on full display, just as they were in the 19th and 20th century. Ultimately, my writing was nothing more than personal venting in my Notes app — a tradition I’ve grown accustomed to over the years in expressing all angry, happy, sad, high, spontaneous, and inquisitive thoughts.

However, less than three weeks later, a white woman named Amy Cooper tried to order a hit on a Black man, Christian Cooper (no relation), in Central Park via the police, and a Black man named George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police as a white officer kept his knee on his neck for over eight minutes while he was unarmed and handcuffed. Since I’ve lived in Manhattan, specifically on the Upper East Side, I have found joy in running around the Jackie Onnasis Reservoir in Central Park. Who’s to say that an Amy Cooper doesn’t call the police on me, for whatever reason she may feel, and that my fate doesn’t end up like George Floyd’s? Who’s to say that my harmless act of jogging doesn’t lead to the same fate as Ahmaud Arbery’s?

It’s certainly not lost on me that these events are transpiring during a global pandemic, a time where a viral disease is supposed to be a common threat that endangers people regardless of their nationality, income, race, gender, sexuality, etc. That in the midst of a deadly virus affecting millions across the world, we should be equally coming together to fight this common threat. However, that’s evidently not the case. As Black Americans make up about 13% of the nation’s population, but only 2.6% of the national’s wealth, and as the median Black family has about 10% of the wealth of the median white family, we are seeing the implications of this gross financial injustice play out in real-time. With comparatively inadequate access to health care, and disproportionately higher rates of asthma, diabetes, and obesity — all preexisting conditions that are known to exacerbate the impact of coronavirus — Black Americans are three times more likely to die from COVID-19 complications than white Americans. Similarly, the financial gap continues to widen in the face of a national recession (akin to the 2008 financial crisis), as Black and Latino workers were more likely to lose their employment than white workers and government assistance programs such as the Payroll Protection Program are 26% less likely to reach minority business owners as compared to their white counterparts.

I say this to say, that even during a global pandemic, we are disproportionately affected by the “silent killer”, we are still being hunted and publicly executed by white citizens and police officers, we are still tear gassed when we protest, we are still centuries behind where we should be, and we are still without justice. In 2020, America, the richest country in the history of the world, that built its wealth and economic powerhouse off the backs of African slave labor, that prides itself on “liberty and justice for all”, cannot continue to treat the descendants of the enslaved as less than human. Something must change.

Before, I would have addressed this to my white counterparts as well, but I believe that we’re way past the moment of bargaining for our humanity with people who consciously choose to turn a blind eye. If you’re unable or unwilling to see what’s still happening in 2020, 157 years since the so-called Emancipation of Black people and 56 years after the Civil Right Act, then I’m not sure if anything will change your mind and this piece is not for you. We, or perhaps I specifically, can’t keep holding your hands through this to make you see what’s happening in every facet of society. Fuck that All Lives Matter bullshit. For my fellow Black Americans and all those genuinely committed to this unfortunate struggle, I really don’t have the answer for how we’ll overcome all of this. It will require some sort of civil disobedience. It will have to be uncomfortable. It will have to be more than social media posts. It will have to be more than expecting one political party to solve our problems, or at the very least, cause less problems than the other. We must demand this change if we expect it to happen.

For now, I’m praying for the families of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, for all Black Americans, for all oppressed peoples around the world, and for those of every background who have lost their lives due to COVID-19.

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” — Martin Luther King Jr., 1963

“When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who has enjoyed the fruits of Americanism. We see America through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism. We don’t see any American dream. We’ve experienced only the American nightmare. We haven’t benefited from America’s democracy. We’ve only suffered from America’s hypocrisy.” — Malcolm X, 1964