Is Sunday morning. I’m having some tea and homemade focaccia as I sit on the couch. I’ve been up for a couple hours and have just read an article from North Carolina, about a 30-ft confederate flag that has been hoisted over a highway there. I sit for several minutes. Why does this article hit me so hard?
I think about what it would be like if I had to drive under a Confederate flag. I think about the reaction in my body every time I see this flag. There is a tensing, a fear that rises up but I don’t encounter this flag so often in the wild. Since I leave in Europe, I imagine how I would feel if I had to walk under a swastika. It feels like my brain is short circuiting.
I share the article about this protest to the removal of racist statues in North Carolina on Twitter and it takes me a long time as I go through iterations of typing and discarding captions for it. My brain is still glitching.
Once I make the post, I spend a few minutes checking the posts of the scholars and professors I follow on Twitter. But after reading example after example of the Black experience in America, I need to escape. It’s too much pain, too much injustice to take in all at once. I feel guilty because other people who look like me, my brothers, my sisters have faced so much discrimination, have been trudging uphill in work and life because of the color of their skin. And while I’ve done some of that too, the situation in the USA seems bigger and worse.
I feel guilty because I haven’t always understood structural racism, because it took me moving to Canada as a teenager and observing the world to notice the tethers that still resist our forward movement, both as individuals and collectively. I was in University before I saw how structural racism limits and hinders Black achievement. And I still have so much to learn.
I can’t watch everything, listen to everything. It’s too much for any one person to carry. And that’s why Black Lives Matter and other movements for justice and equality are important. In serried ranks, we can make more progress.
How was your morning?
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