A lynching took place, and the cell phone video made all of America privy to George Floyd's last few minutes of life on Earth.
Black lives matter. In the following weeks after the Floyd murder, cities everywhere gathered in protest of this state-sanctioned violence. Due to living with a medically-vulnerable person during the early COVID weeks-- I did not allow myself to participate in Pensacola's gathering of people from all around our area. My first task was keeping COVID out of our home-- so I " participated" in the Black Lives matter movement from my home . To be honest, there was nothing more I wanted than to add my body to all the other bodies gathering peacefully at the Graffiti Bridge for two weeks after the murder.
As an Aunt to two beautiful multiracial children and as a Christian with Ashkenazi Jewish DNA, this was personal for me. I am not a parent, but when I heard George Floyd call out for his mother as he struggled to breathe, the nurturer in me felt sick.
A man was murdered on national TV over the suspected use of fake money.
A man was smothered to death by a cop.
NO ONE DESERVES TO MEAN THEIR END IN THIS CRUEL MANNER.
George Floyd was Black--- the cop who killed him on camera is White.
People I know have asked me " why must everything be about race?"
Humans of Planet Earth: this, the murder of a Black man by a White cop is nothing new. As a White person, I've had to deconstruct much of what I had been taught in school about post Reconstruction racial relations. Segregation did not end when the 13th Amendment was placed into the U.S. Constitution.
One visit to the Equal Justice Initiative Lynching Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama will tell the entire sordid story of lynching of Black men for bogus " crimes". In the not-too-distant past, a Black man was lynched for allegedly looking at a White woman incorrectly.
Y'all, we need to continue to " talk about race" because it can be literally a matter of life or death to Black and Brown people. Does talking about how I-- a White woman-- have benefited from systemic racism make me feel warm and fuzzy? Hell no. It is hard work to come to terms with how Whiteness allows people with my skin tone to be raised to trust the police. Black and Brown children, and their parents, do not enjoy this luxury.
I stay in this fight for many reasons. Two of my primary reasons for working to rid the world of racism and the police brutality that is so rampant are a seven and five-year-old who share my DNA and my last name. Their lives, and the lives of people with their skin tone, matter.
George Floyd probably has an Aunt or two who are mourning him.
I cannot imagine the grief and pain his family and friends have experienced as the defense vomited every mistake that Floyd had done -- as if his past choices somehow warranted his gruesome, cruel, public murder.
Bryan Stevenson said " Each of us are more than the worst thing we've done."
George Floyd did not deserve to die. And he surely DID NOT deserve his last nine minutes and twenty nine seconds of his life.
Rest in Power-- George Floyd.
~Sarah Elizabeth McCarren
19 April 2021
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