written may 29, 2020 and still pertinent after fires stained the sky orange

CW: anti-Blackness, racism, violence, death

Today, I was supposed to plant poppies. Instead, I found myself on the phone with my father while he cried.

Today, yesterday, seemingly tomorrow, something happens that, as my father said, should only have happened years ago — something that I think should never happen.

I remember sitting in my dorm room in Bloomington the day after the 2016 presidential election, typing up a Facebook post on the very same sheets that I sit on now as I look out my window in my bedroom in Berkeley. In 2016, I said that the unfolding of the election proved that people want the United States to change. A moderate-progressive did not and could not win the election. People pleaded for change, and here we are in 2020, and I see no change. This year, I see white people spewing, symbolizing, and inciting violence without consequence as they did when the Philadelphia Eagles won the Superbowl in 2018. I see an election eerily similar to that 4 years ago. I see a Black man being unable to breathe.

Eric Garner died July 17, 2014 at the hands of police brutality. On May 25, 2020 George Floyd died by the same hands and for the same reason: for being Black. Holding back my own tears for days, not knowing what to do anymore, I called my father.

He told me that one thing that has kept Black folks moving forward is faith, and that from faith grows hope. Questions arose. Do I have faith in our systems and institutions? No. If hope is born of faith, and I have no faith, then is there also no way to hope? I have no faith in systems that — even in the midst of a pandemic killing thousands and thousands of (Black, brown, and low-income) people — still facilitate the violent, conscious, fully-intended murder of Black folks. Then, how can I develop hope?

I have no answers, and neither did my father.

We live in this echo of history and time, we live in a back-and-forth and now-and-then, somewhere stagnated in the middle. Though the United States has made some motions forward, we have not made much change from the country that cheated my great-grandparents out of their land in Oklahoma. Our country, to this day, cheats Black people out of everything down to our own lives. And because of that, I am tired. I’m tired because it is still apparently radical to ask for justice for Black folks. I’m tired because my father, my brother, my grandma, my aunt, my cousins could become a headline just because they were sitting in their own homes watching television. And no amount of tears from me, no amount of my screaming, no amount of my voting has ever done anything to change this. These systems do not work in our favor, so I found myself thinking that if you disagree with that statement, then fine. Then step on my neck. Tell me I can’t walk in a park. Shoot me through my windows. Shoot me in my own home while I sleep. Beat me as I protest. Shoot me while I walk home. Shoot me, beat me, kill me. Hang me from a tree. If you are not Black, and you’re not doing anything right now, then you might as well do this to me anyway. US democracy is hypocrisy. There is no faith, there is no hope.

Still, I was thinking too narrowly. Today, I was supposed to plant poppies, but instead I did something much more notable. Before I got off the phone with my father, I told him I loved him. I haven’t said that to him in a long time.

I may not have faith in our “criminal justice” system, our political system, our economic system, but I do have faith in my community. My hope stems from Black people, Blackness, Black legacy. Our deaths are not capital, our deaths are not trivial, our deaths are not more civil than destroying the physical manifestations of oppression. Our deaths are an expression of the evils of our systems and institutions. Our lives are resistance. Community is what keeps us going.

Right now, I’m watching Avatar: The Last Airbender with my roommate and my best friend. That does not end the pain I feel — the pain so many Black folks feel today and much too often. However, this is the love that I will hang on to as we fight against this wretched world. Community brings love and love brings hope. Today didn’t go as I planned, but I was reminded of the love I am so lucky to live with. With my friends and family, both dead and alive, behind me, I’m ready to finally make change. I’m ready to keep fighting for Black liberation. I hope anyone reading this is ready to fight, too.