I’m not okay…and neither are you

Published in

Popcorn for Dinner

5 min readJun 6, 2020

July 13, 2013

I was excitedly preparing for the start of my first semester at University. It was also the day George Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges in the murder of Trayvon Martin. My then-nascent Twitter timeline was rife with anger from black celebrities while I was completely oblivious to the terrible events of the 17 months prior; this was the first time I was confronted with the glaring gap in my racial education.

Look, I spent the first 18 years of my life in Nigeria, where everyone looked like me. Sure, I knew about racism but I hadn’t experienced it. I didn’t understand it. I wanted to. I had to.

I’m in a lot of pain right now.

There’s no way to sugarcoat it; there’s no literary beautification. The truth of my reality is that I have been in visceral pain for the past few days. Black death has, in the 7 years since that George Zimmerman verdict, risen exponentially and the black bodies have continued to pile up with the same care and consideration shown to trash thrown off the side of a bridge.

Perhaps as a way to safeguard our mental health, we had settled into a routine that followed each senseless killing — online anger, hashtags with the victims’ names, short, unsustainable real-world demonstrations; then rinse and repeat for the next murder. This routine helped me, and I’m sure many others, avoid the full range of heartbreaking emotions associated with each killing.

However, something different happened on the 25th of May 2020. I hate that I have to refer to the senseless murder of a human being as a ‘watershed moment’, but unfortunately that is what the killing of George Floyd has become.

Sustained protests have erupted in all 50 American states and in several cities around the world. Black people the world over have shown a solidarity that could never have been foreseen. This is of course, not in response to just the killing of George Floyd. Hours before the news of his death, we all saw the video of a white woman calling the police and asking for their presence while falsely accusing a black man, Christian Cooper. Every black person watching that video knew that eight out of ten times that video starts with the cops already present and more likely than not, has a more tragic end. Ahmaud Arbery was killed while jogging in February, Breonna Taylor was, in March, shot 8 times in her bed by the police after they barged into the wrong house. Adama Traoré, who was the symbol for last week’s French protests, died in police custody in Paris, in 2016. Belly Mujinga died from COVID-19 a few weeks after being spat at while working at Victoria Station, not to mention the scores of other black civilians killed by police or alt-right violence in America in recent years. So yes, black people have a lot to be angry about. We have decided that enough is enough and after begging for our lives to matter, we are ready to demand that they do.

If all these protests were to simultaneously stop tomorrow, I would be very proud of what I have witnessed. There have been notable direct effects of the protests- Breonna Taylor’s death would not have been reopened by the FBI if we didn’t put the national spotlight on it. Neither the arrests of the other 3 police officers involved in George Floyd’s death nor the raising of the charge for the main culprit (from third-degree murder to second degree) would have been possible without the worldwide protests. These are tangible successes and ones we should be proud of.

However, what I hold highest about these protests is that they have managed to stimulate the passion of the entire black population. People are awake now. Those who were already awake are tired of keeping quiet. Everyone is angry and thank God because I’ve been waiting to get angry.

The past couple of weeks have been very tough. Not only because of the mounting deaths of black people in America, but also, back in Nigeria, anarchy remains dominant. Tina Ezekwe was a 17-year-old student murdered by a policeman on the 26th of May, for the crime of walking back home. Gender violence protests have also broken out across the country after Farishina, a 12-year-old girl was raped by eleven(!!) men and Uwavera Omozuwa, a university student was raped and left to die in a church where she had gone to study. Women have taken to the streets and the internet to protest these injustices.

They continue to rail against the society that educates its sons that they have an entitlement to women’s bodies, against men who refuse to hear and understand the importance of “No”, against a police force that is more likely to support the rapist than the victim and against the men who encourage and protect, either directly or indirectly, their rapist friends. Many women have mustered the courage to recount their abuse stories and call out their own rapists. The courage of these women knows no bounds and it is a courage we should never ask of another human being.

These Nigerian women, along with the black people in Minneapolis and subsequently all over the world, have ignited a fuse that we are determined to keep burning. We are here now and this time, we aren’t backing down.

A major drawback to protesting is the toll it takes on us. I’m not talking about the physical one (drink water, you’ll be fine), but the emotional and mental one. I’ve found it impossible to get through my work in the past week. Although I am tired all day, I click on every link and hyperlink, eager to read all I can.

Luckily, I came across the above tweet which led me to speak to a few of my black friends. I quickly realised that this wasn’t some “lazy period” I was experiencing, this was a direct result of the pain we were all collectively feeling. It was impossible, almost farcical, for us to believe we could continue with our regularly scheduled programming after watching a man die live on camera and then witnessing the incineration of a country as a result.

So, yeah, we are not okay and I wouldn’t expect us to be. If you take anything from this well-edited rant, it should be for you to take care of yourself. Please, I beg each and every one of you, prioritise your mental health. There is so much going on out there that you need to be fully charged to face. So, if you have to unplug and do a news purge for a day or so, do that. If you have a happy place that you can get to via music or TV, please do that. Whatever it may be, do what you can to take care of yourself. It is easy to feel that your immediate well-being pales in comparison to the lives lost or those out there protesting but it doesn’t. Yes, we need you, but we need you at your best. We do not want to lose more people in this fight. So, please rest and come back when you are at your fighting shape.

See you back on the frontlines.

Breonna Taylor-