I have been struggling this last week with the events that have been unfolding around across and through the world following the death of George Floyd. I’ve been struggling with this and living with the symptoms of COVID 19 something that I’ve been doing for the past three weeks. I’ve been struggling with this as a Black man in Britain in his late 50s of Guyanese origin.
But I just realised that we are living in a moment, moments like these are rare. They are hard to describe. Being too young I can’t tell you where I was when Martin Luther King Junior died, nor can I tell you where I was when JFK died or Malcolm X. When George Floyd died, I was sitting on my bed. His death was a spark.
We are in a weird time, a time of climate change and Gretta Thunberg, a time of President Trump and the ‘me too’ movement – and certainly a time of so many known and unknown Black deaths caused by Law enforcement –
Eric Garner – USA
Edson Da Costa – UK
David Dungay – Australia
Tanisha Anderson – USA
Tanya Day – Australia
Yvette Smith – USA
Jean Charles de Menezes – UK
Breonna Taylor – USA
A moment, a moment of pain and a moment of change. So much happened in the 60s and it feels as though it has to happen again. People fought for justice; concerning race, regarding gender, sexuality; and about a global and increasing distinction between the haves and have nots. A lot of people thought that actually, the main thing that people were fighting was the economic injustice of capitalism that immorally divided humanity; that made women, Black people less than human. And when I say Black concerning people, I am using that old political term, an old inclusive term that identifiers all people of colour in relation to a basic belief in which we are perceived as, and forced to be less, aspire to less, and die for less than white people. Similar to the way that women were seen to be less, could aspire to less, and the lives were worth less than men. And that’s not mentioning Stonewall just as the names listed above doesn’t even mention any Native American Women.
If there is a bottom there has to be a top, if there is a Black there has to be a white, if there is a wrong there has to be a right and yet, I still can’t in my heart understand that the fight for justice is always through injustice.
Injustice immeasurable recorded and unrecorded pain brings us to where we are now. In that pain are the seeds of bitterness, anger and vengeance. So, Trevor Noah, talking about rioting talks about the question of ‘the right way’ to object to injustice. And I say this not because I agree or disagree but simply because the question is raised and it’s an urgent question. The question being raised in a way that reminds me that when Martin Luther King gave his ‘I have a dream’ speech he said that ‘this is not a time for gradualism’. A moment is immediate.
I hope that this moment can be seen to be Complex and subtle too. Black lives matter. that simple statement was explained with so much depth and meaning by James Baldwin when he spoke to the Cambridge Union because this is not simple it is subtle. The Black lives of all of the immigrant workers from various places in Africa and elsewhere who work in American slaughterhouses, in inhumane conditions, in a time of COVID-19 who were commanded to remain at work even though this infection was killing them matter.
The chant of George Floyd David Dungay and too many more ‘I can’t breathe’ matters.
The people who are gathering across the world in this time of COVID-19 in recognition of racial injustice at home and abroad who now chant I can’t breathe and may soon experience that same shortness of breath matter. And yes, my son was matching too.
To me, Black is still a political term because I choose to make it inclusive and to remember the history of racism. when Haiti was the first place to overcome slavery, the European indentured who fought beside the Black slaves became Black. In Guyana when Portuguese indentured workers were brought onto the plantations beside people of African origin and of Indian origin they too were identified as a race and not as the white who owned them. For me, it is important that we are inclusive, and we must share it. We must understand, empathise with and support each other’s struggles at this moment. These struggles are not all the same they are not necessarily all ours until we understand that we are all human. And we fight for humanity.
We fight for love, we fight to care, we fight for that which is good and that which is true that which has meaning, that is bigger than each of us. This isn’t a time when it is clear how we do this, but it is a time when we know in our hearts we must.
I hope and pray in these struggles we will find common ground and we will unite in humanity. I hope and pray that we will find ways to be resilient because we must first be resilient to be effective. Demonstrations in a time of COVID-19 come at a high cost. I hope that we find virtual ways, democratic ways, subtle ways to leaver far more force. I hope and pray our commitment to our specific causes and struggles also deepen, and in our greater understandings our struggles combine and in our greater awareness, we become committed to struggles which are also struggles of humanity that we did not see. That we see the way that COVID-19 in countries of low income is cleaving through the poorest men women and children of Brown and Black skins. That we remember in a world distracted by COVID-19 the injustice being carried out in Hong Kong in the Muslim ‘re-education camps in China and the way indigenous people of the Amazon in Brazil are being allowed to die opening the land for development.
I hope and pray in this spirit of humanity that we understand our relationship with the ground beneath, us the air we breathe and water we drink the world we live in and its subtle balance.
This is a moment. Ameen
SAM
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