I have trouble sleeping sometimes but recently when I find myself awake in the early morning hours it’s because I imagine what it’s like to have someone’s knee compressing my neck to the point of asphyxiation.
Yeah, I know, I’m white, and George Floyd was black, but otherwise we could have been the same person— I mean, there are obvious differences, surely, but he was a father and a husband, and I think if share those things are at the center of your experience, you have a lot in common. I don’t know much about the details of his life, I don’t know what he thought about, what he felt, what he liked to eat, read, watch, but all I know is I become him for moments at a time, feeling the knee, the bone crunch, the feeling of not being about to breathe, the final struggle, and the eventual passing into nothingness. The experience is sharply burned into my imagination, and though I would likely never do such a thing, it makes me want to break things whenever I get to feeling that way.
I’m not a stranger to white violence. I remember cops on horseback, rampaging through Tompkins Square Park, beating the piss out of the homeless who’d taken shelter there in the tent city they had built up, as well as the squatters and folks from the neighborhood who tried to defend them. I remember seeing their bloody faces in the news. I lived a block and a half away at the time, and a roommate and I had been chased by the cops because we were taking pictures of the mayhem.
But on my body as well. I remember trying to break up a fight outside a fast food joint early one morning after a night out, when I was grabbed by six guys in uniform windbreakers who held me down and beat me. Two guys had grabbed my arms and swung my body down while another repeatedly kicked me in the face. I remember the bluish green flash of each strike, and I wonder today if part of the panic and paranoia I continue to suffer I learned at that moment 40 years ago.
A few months later I found myself being pummeled by three guys in a bar, because I was offensive and disrespectful about the way I spoke to them about the way they were grabbing some woman’s butt. A bouncer dragged me out by my feet and propped me up outside where one of the guys, who had snuck out by the rear exist, finished me off until I dropped to my knees, and my friends dragged me off to the car.
I was a long-haired dude, say 20 or 21 years old, in the short-haired suburbs, after all, so maybe I deserved it.
I imagine some of those guys, out of their love of kicking ass, may have become cops, or gravitated to other positions of power. Some of them may have turned out to be my friends, customers, who knows?
And I’m not trying to equate my experience to those of people of color, or any other minority. I just know if these types of things could happen to me, they’re probably going to happen worse to people who don’t get associated with the default dominant racial identity.
White people riot, destroy public property, even do things like burn cop cars when their home sports team wins or loses, so I think we have to be a little more understanding about what happens after they see someone who looks like them, for the umpteenth time, being murdered by some blue-uniformed white guy employed by the state. Especially after being bottled up with the rules around this pandemic, the fear, and understanding that their people are more likely to die than the default dominant racial identity folks like myself. Because of historic economic injustice, the trauma of decimated families that lingers for multiple generations. You name it. There’s a lot of healing that needs to be done here.
And I say their people. I say that but I want to be able to say my people. I want them to trust me. I don’t want them to be them, but for us to us. I can’t believe I am now forced to make this distinction, because I’m essentially talking about my friends and colleagues, but I feel I have to in this instance, because these friends and colleagues are in no way allowed to live in the same universe that I live in, and that really sucks.
Some people work hard to earn the trust of others and accepting a pattern of violence like the repeated destruction of black lives by white cops as “just a fact of life” is only something that destroys that trust.
This may be offensive to some of you, and I’m sorry for that. But I was having trouble sleeping again. So I’m going to post this.
Peace.