Hi,
It’s been a rough couple of weeks. I couldn’t, and still can’t, bring myself to look at the video of the killing of George Floyd. I still can’t get through the transcript of his final words. I can’t look at all the smiling black faces, now dead, that people are posting to honour the already fallen. I struggle to look at protests, and I can’t get to the end of a speech or an interview with protestors. I don’t know what happened this time. Black death and black anger is nothing new but this time, instead of being weary, I was paralysed with anger.
You see, it’s not just white people that are going through a period of realisation. Black people are going through it too.
Most black people I have spoken with have said the same thing – they didn’t know how angry they were. They reported feelings of paralysis, the same inability to talk about it, and an extreme sensitivity to footage. I have spent so much time hiding, blunting and smoothing the edges of my anger. To accept that nothing is going to change: that one can’t go through one’s life litigating race grievances whenever one comes across them. Over time it’s become more painful to hope than it is to despair.
Now it seems like something is happening. People are waking up to all the things that you’ve tried to tell them about micro-aggressions, about police bias, about pay disparity, and it’s too much. It’s too hard. It’s too jolting to suddenly be heard and be seen. Like, where do you start?
Do you start with the fact that you’re angry with your white friends who never once mentioned race and suddenly get on board with the solidarity movement? Do you start with all the people you ever worked with, who slighted you and denigrated your concerns, suddenly popping up on social media with their Black Lives Matter hashtag? Or do you start with the fact that your anger is probably irrational and no single person deserves to be on the end of it?
A general rule is that comparisons to the Arab Spring are trite. But having lived through that, one thing feels similar: the sense of emotion overwhelming the politics. I remember those days, as Arab dictators fell one by one. They weren’t coherent times of political organisation. They were one long roller coaster of grief and euphoria. Grief that so many had to suffer and die before change came about. Euphoria that something which I never thought possible appeared suddenly on the horizon.
So this newsletter is a chance to say that if you are going through the same thing, this is normal. There’s trauma. There is history. All this can’t be organised overnight into a neat political protest movement. If you are not black yourself and trying to divine the best way to be of help, perhaps one of the most important ways is not to expect anything; at least, not anything uniform in the responses from black people.
Let them breathe and give them space. It’s been a rough couple of weeks.
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