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We’re Battling for the Soul of America
Was the summer of 2020 a wake-up call, a reckoning or a revolution?
With six months under our belts in 2021, many have begun to refer to 2020 as the “lost year.” Twenty-twenty was the year that brought us so much — trauma, a reset, inner peace, anxiety. Essentially, it was a basket case of a year. If you are Black, however, it brought with it the persistent reminder that even in the midst of a global pandemic, where a trip to the grocery store could land you in the hospital or worse, being Black in America was still just as deadly as contracting Covid-19. Twenty-twenty made hashtags and household names of Black Americans just trying to live, sleep, run, and shop: Ahmaud Arbury, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and the list, sadly, goes on from there.
Consequently, it would be the murder of George Floyd, captured on video by the brave teenager Darnella Frazier, that the nation would collectively watch in horror, in which former police officer and now convicted murder Derek Chauvin pressed the life out of Floyd. It was Chauvin’s heinous act of depravity for human life that compelled Americans in all 50 states to leave the safety of their homes to protest what we couldn’t unsee: Black life truly didn’t matter to far too many people. While there have been too many Black lives lost to state-sanctioned violence over too many decades to count — it was the callousness that Chauvin exhibited and the calls from Floyd for his dead mother that sent America over the edge.
A year later brings all this plus a conviction on all three counts, yet the question remains: What has really shifted in America?
There were multiple video angles of Chauvin’s terrorism. Tens of thousands of people left their homes in a pandemic to call foul. His own police chief testified against him. Multiple witnesses wept from the stands, and as a collective, we waited with bated breath wondering if a killer cop caught on clear video would actually be convicted. Is that what justice is supposed to feel like? Is that how much it takes to believe that a Black life matters? Should it be this difficult to get accountability for something so blatant? In America apparently, it’s the only way.
