In today’s media, Black people are constantly reminded on a daily basis of the importance of strength, persistence, relentlessness, and the ability to persevere through the hardest of times. As if dealing with the everyday struggles of being a human being isn’t already hard enough, it often times seems as if society expects Black people to exhume some form of superpower from within to handle the constant grief placed upon our community.
While Black people may be used to carrying the load, what happens when that load is simply too much to bear? The year 2020 has been spent fighting two pandemics within the United States of America. The first being COVID-19, a global virus that has put a massive halt on life as we have known it. Throughout the United States, this virus has infected more than 6 million people and claimed more than 180,000 lives. The second pandemic has plagued this country since the beginning of its existence, that being racism. Racism has been systematically embedded so deep into American culture, that a world free of it seems unimaginable.
The killing of 46-year-old George Floyd on May 25, 2020 by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin and three of his colleagues, who aided and abetted in Mr. Floyd’s murder, sparked a revolution across the United States of America. Floyd is only one of many to lose his life at the hands of police brutality. However, so many of these cases go unseen, unheard, and unjustly disappear into the confines of the American judicial system.
Minneapolis, serving as the epicenter of the revolution, influenced uprisings across the United States. These revolts have demanded change, structural reform, and justice for those who have unjustly lost their lives, including Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. The recording of another unarmed, motionless Black man being held to the ground with a police officer’s knee on his neck as he pleaded for his life, called out for his mother and children, gasped for air and said, “I can’t breathe” resounded around the world.
American society has become desensitized to seeing Black men lose their lives on phone recordings and being added to a list of social media hashtags. However, the protests, social media outrage, and uprisings following George Floyd’s death have brought issues caused by systematic racism to the forefront.
Today, along with the rest of the world, America’s main focus is to discover ways to adapt to life post COVID-19. America yearns for a sense of normalcy, and a return to what life use to be. However, for the Black community, the goal is to make sure that some societal norms never return. In this new normal, the goal is to make sure that Black lives matter.
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