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May 25th, 2020 was a day, not too long ago, when processing information psychologically and physically felt like the equivalent of bungee jumping from an airplane without a harness. The internet is a constant overload of information and it’s not easy to process and filter all that information at once. In a lockdown, it’s hard enough to be miles away from your support systems and struggling to do your daily chores. Prone to recurrent anxiety, I realised that provocative news riled me up in an instant. I proactively stopped reading news one month into the lockdown. I certainly don’t take pride in being unaware of the crippling politics of my country or the feminist movement being butchered by some locker-room horrors. The death of George Floyd, however, felt personal.

It took me weeks to register the amount of hate-crimes being committed against the vulnerable all across the world. This is happening in the same capacity after decades of our constitutions reserving rights for the marginalised. I texted my political science professor saying that I wanted to write a piece on the black movement considering the theme of this year’s college magazine being ‘Ubuntu’. I felt like this edition wouldn’t live up to its sanctity if we eliminated the story of George Floyd. When I speak about George Floyd, I am also speaking about Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Atatiana Jefferson, Aura Rosser, Stephon Clark, Trayvon Martin and it pains me to write that this list is never-ending. What looks like a bunch of names, were someone’s family and world. Most of these cases did not even qualify for a fair trial and were dismissed with pointless financial settlements. I was supposed to submit this piece two days after I spoke to my professor. I swore to do her proud. One day into my research, I felt like a fraud. I did not have any knowledge about black lives. I consumed white television, movies and literature. I felt like I was cheating on myself. I chose not to start writing until I had a base and a background.

I started with a documentary called 13th directed by Ava DuVernay on Netflix. I was caught off-guard with my sheer unawareness about black hyper-incarceration. It was a carefully strategised way to rip off the black demographic of any semblance of freedom that the 13th amendment act promised to divulge. This act was ratified in 1865 and has been exploited and abused till date. This documentary talked about some of the distressing and borderline racist legislations passed by the most iconic presidents of the United States. Mentioning a few might lead to a bit of clarity here- The 3 strikes law: the 3 strikes and you’re out law corners anyone with a record of more than 3 petty crimes. It incapacitates a person to receive any fair trial and inhibits them from qualifying for a punishment less severe than life imprisonment. In March 1994, Governor Wilson from California signed this into law and changed the trajectory of hyper-incarceration forever. This law was proposed by ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) which in hindsight can be attributed as an extremely racist and sexist organisation feeding off of the capitalism at the hands of privatisatised prisons. They capitalise from forced and unpaid prison labour. In recent times, PRWatch reported that ALEC alumni and Iowa congressman Steve King pondered whether there “would be any population of the world left without rape and incest”. Besides Steve King, Former Arizona representative and ALEC member David Stringer spiked controversy when he said that there weren’t enough white kids around to integrate Arizona schools and that immigration is an existential threat to the city. He was forced to resign after he incessantly engaged in racist speeches and his history of child sexual abuse came to light.

Stand your Ground law again was one of ALEC’s productions. “Stand your ground laws generally state that, under certain circumstances, individuals can use force to defend themselves without first attempting to retreat from the danger. The purpose behind these laws is to remove any confusion about when individuals can defend themselves and to eliminate prosecutions of people who legitimately used self-defence even though they had not attempted to retreat from the threat”. Castle Doctrine Laws are similar to these laws in terms of real property. It allows you to take necessary courses of action in self-defence inside home boundaries. Stand Your Ground is broader in its outlook. It’s regressing because it invests power in anyone claiming to feel threatened and allow them to act in self-defense even if it means to take up a weapon and fatally attack someone. Trayvon Martin was on the receiving end of this gruesome law. George Zimmerman shot 17-year-old Trayvon claiming that he felt threatened by him. He faced no charges.

The immigration enforcement law called the SB 1070, a third law proposed by ALEC started being debated. This law allowed the incarceration of anyone that looked like an immigrant. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070 into law and legally mandated racial profiling. These corporations privatised parole and probation and pushed for house arrests. Private companies started making billions of dollars out of GPS monitoring. After all, wealth, not culpability, shaped outcomes in America. This documentary was a huge eye-opener because it taught me how some of the worst human rights violations were happening right under our nose and nobody was being held accountable. Plea Bargains were the worst of them all because the convicts feared more jail time and pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit.

Ava DuVernay generated “When They See Us”, another gripping documentary, follows the real story of five young teenagers: Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise and Raymond Santana who were unlawfully convicted of rape and put to prison in Harlem. Linda Fairstein, the leading investigation officer and her team coerces these young boys to give false statements and to plead guilty to the crime. They harass and traumatise them in the absence of any adult supervision. They each serve time in the prison for somewhere between 6–13 years and lose one of the crucial phases of growing up. The case gains traction after years when the real culprit pleads guilty and they are set free. This hardly makes any difference when you spent your formative years in prison being bullied and constantly living in a fear of being reduced down to your race. Once you’re a convicted felon, you are stripped of your right to vote or hold a job. Raymond Saltana finds himself in drug peddling right after he makes it out of prison. This might look absurd to us but a young adult with a record of a felony has to fight a gazillion odds to procure a job and that possibility looks bleak when you’re a coloured individual in a prejudiced society. When he does come back to his older life, he finds himself with a father who has an extremely hostile second wife. She wouldn’t think twice before calling Raymond a rapist. Troubled with the thought of not having any money to sustain himself, he takes the easy way out and gets arrested again. Blacks have been oppressed through police brutality for as long as they have been granted rights on paper. This is also one of the biggest catalysts that made rap what it is today. The Defiant Ones, a docu-series on Netflix throws light on this issue. Directed and co-written by Allen Hughes, it follows the trajectory of how rap became a form of dissent and expression. Dr Dre becomes the face of gangster rap. He creates the N.W.A (Niggas With Attitudes) reclaiming a term that was racist in its origin and making it the face of black dissent.

Dre’s rap centred primarily around black freedom. His brand ‘beats’ soon took over other audio brands. The world saw a black man reach the pinnacle of success in a diabolically supremacist society. They collaborated with Apple and revolutionised black music across cultures. Watching this docu-series also made me realise how vulnerable black lives are. Black lives are lost in the bat of an eye-lid. Tupac Shakur, a 25-year-old rap artist, was shot down at a traffic signal. They were harmless individuals who were fighting for basic human rights. Learning and educating about these incidents made me arrive at the conclusion that empathy is not enough. This movement needs outrage and severe momentum.

My education was shielded from any significant black literature apart from a few essays on Tony Morrison and a couple of black poems by Maya Angelou. I felt like it was time to adopt a reasonable course of action. Reading Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ gave me a lot of insight into the politics among tribes and clans. The reason this book is so important is because before 1958 (when this book was published) African literature was written by Europeans. Achebe is among the first black writers who took agency of his own race and put an end to the saviour complex propagated by the white writers. The book explores the colonisation of African tribes and mass religion-based conversions. Achebe wanted to portray a pre-colonial Igboland and give his readers a raw visual of the atrocities committed by the white missionaries on the native Africans.

When it comes to African literature, the contribution of James Baldwin is unparalleled. ‘I Am Not Your Negro’, a Netflix documentary follows his life based on his unfinished book that explored racism through the lens of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Baldwin was an exceptional revolutionary, a scholar, writer and professor. His magnum opus, ‘The Fire Next Time’ is one of his most acclaimed works. He is held in high regard for his contribution to the Civil Rights Movement. This documentary draws inspiration from Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript called Remember This House. He passed away in 1987 leaving behind this manuscript incomplete. The documentary begins with Baldwin’s anticipated return to Harlem after spending a year in France. He felt the need to return back home gain momentum after he saw a photograph of 15-year-old Dorothy Counts being heckled by a mob on her way to school. He couldn’t sit in the comfort of Paris and participate in the discourse of Black Lives without feeling like a fraud. The film encapsulates the finest speeches delivered by him but at the same time fails to discuss his works on sexuality. The fact that he was a queer black man fighting in the Civil Rights Movement made his contemporaries such as President John F. Kennedy, and many others refer to him disparagingly as “Martin Luther Queen”. Eldridge Cleaver, one of the leaders of the Black Panther Party, wrote in his memoir Soul on Ice: “The case of James Baldwin aside for a moment, it seems that many Negro homosexuals, acquiescing in this racial death-wish, are outraged and frustrated because in their sickness they are unable to have a baby by a white man” (The Atlantic). He was queer and black in a white country. It’s worth a watch because Baldwin was a revolutionary with all the odds against him.

The reason we need to expose ourselves and the coming generations to African literature, art and history is because this movement needs to recognise the voices that fought before them. George Floyd was an innocent man brutally murdered by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer by kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. This incident has been trivialised to a snapchat challenge amongst minors. We collectively need to reflect upon the emotions and the kind of empathy we are failing as a society. Floyd paid a price that no individual deserves to pay. He lost his life over something as trivial as a 20$ counterfeit bill. He begged for mercy, he begged for air, he begged for a few seconds of life. It was all taken away at the blink of an eye. We cannot let people forget that he had a wife and a daughter. She will have to grow up without a father and part of this systemic racism is to be blamed on us. We cannot forget this because #BlackLivesMatter.