Hope Divided
We have taken to the streets in the last few months chanting, “No justice, no peace!” We have laid on the ground for 8 minutes, the time it took for an officer’s knee to squeeze the breath out of a black man’s throat. We have written on social media Black Lives Matter and spoken their names into the dark night: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, Jacob Blake (and too many other names to count). It is long overdue.
At the height of the protests I was studying for a board exam. I hardly even knew protests were occurring in Denver until my phone buzzed with the alert for a curfew order. It felt like the world was ending. I drove through downtown to find store windows boarded up and graffiti scrolled across the bricks of the buildings. Tents sprawled along Civic Center Park—a makeshift city for the homeless. I saw pictures on social media of vast crowds on the steps of the capitol building, their fists raised and masks strapped around their face.
At first, I felt guilty that I couldn’t participate; I had chosen to focus on my exam instead. I sat on my front stoop, the sun cresting high in the sky, thinking of how these protests were so much more important than a board exam. “Yes,” a friend agreed with me later on the phone, “but you still have to pass the test.”
A week later, once I had finished my board exam, I went to the protests myself. It was a Wednesday afternoon. A group of medical students, none of which I knew, were going to the protests together. I donned a pair of powder blue scrubs and re-purposed some cardboard from my recycling bin, scrounging for a sharpie and writing Black Lives Matter across the front.
I met the hap-dash group of medical students at the specified location. A few brand-new residents joined us as well, their long white coats still stiff from being folded in their packaging. Once assembled we walked down to the capitol building, the mountains looming in the distance. We arranged ourselves in the crowd, a thick brick of people dressed in scrubs and white coats.
We chanted: “Say His Name!”
We thrust our signs into the air as passersby honked their horns. Two, three, four, five honks. So many that our voices were drowned in their chorus. Drivers held up their fists, looking from one side of the street to the other with solemn smiles. Others held their fists out the open windows and sunroofs. Women with long acrylic nails snapped pictures on their phone, giddy with the intoxication of our present history. Black drivers slowed down and nodded their heads.
“George Floyd!”
Someone walked around, tapping people on the shoulder, asking if they needed a bottle of water. They wore overalls with a white ribbed tank top and their head was shaved. They tapped me on the shoulder. “Stay hydrated,” they said. “It’s hot out here.” I thanked them and tucked the water bottle into the back pocket of my scrubs. I watched as they returned to a white card table placed under a tree, just a few feet back from the rest of the protesters. It was the kind of table set up at PTO bake sales. They had a pile of aluminum wrapped goods on one side of the table with a flimsy sign that read “Tamales $3.” On the other side sat a mountain of water bottles that broke free of their plastic encasement, spilling over the table and lawn. I could tell without asking that they had been there for days selling tamales and handing out water bottles.
“Say her name!”
A dad whose arms were covered in tattoos and, coincidentally, was also dressed in overalls and a white t-shirt, shoved his fist into the air, shouting at the top of his lungs. His son, who could be no more than 7-years-old, looked up at him. He had big wire rimmed glasses that made his eyes look larger than they actually were. He stomped his white sneaker into the concrete. That’s it, son, I could imagine his father encouraging him (though, I couldn’t actually see what he was saying with the mask and all). The two were mirror images of one another, each with blonde hair and glasses, each one chanting to the beats of the crowd.
“Breonna Taylor!”
Another family stood further down on the corner of the street. Mom and dad dressed in shorts and t-shirts, their three girls in similar attire. They could be going to soccer practice. Their youngest sat in a pink stroller, a cardboard sign in her sticky hands.
We are in an era where parents feel that protests are no longer for young people. This was a moment to teach their children, to find the values within their family and stand up against an image of a world they didn’t agree with.
“I can’t breathe!”
Photographers were interspersed between us. They pounced into the street when there was a break in cars, squatting low and angling their camera up at us. Snap. Snap. Girls dressed in cut off shorts and black t-shirts, black masks strapped across their mouths. A dog on a leash, cardboard signs placed around his belly like a hanging advertisement. STOP Racism, one sign read.
“No Justice! No Peace!”
When there was a lull in the traffic a man dressed in green velvet pants and a fedora strutted up the street playing a trumpet. We all stopped our chanting. He seemed to appear out of thin air, his music floating between the two sides of the street. We pressed our signs to our bellies, staring in awe.
“Let’s go!” the dad with tattoos and overalls shouted, stepping into the street and raising his fist to the sky. His son followed behind him. And we did the same, some running up the street, others dancing in tune with the beat.
We marched through the streets of downtown, the black man with his trumpet leading the way. He bellowed his tunes up to the top floors of empty office buildings and shiny windowed apartment complexes. We chanted and sung and smiled and I was filled with an immense pride for the people around me; for the person who was camped beneath the oak tree with their endless supply of water bottles; for the dad who brought his young son to the protests and for the family with their three small girls in candy colored soccer shorts. I was proud of the group of medical students that were now interspersed throughout the crowd, easy to pick out in our scrubs and white coats; for the passersby who honked in solidarity; and for the photographers who captured this moment in history. I was proud of all of us. We had used our voices to air our dissent, our disapproval of how the cops had continually gotten away with the murder of black men and black women.
“This is what democracy looks like!”
It gave me hope.
Perhaps this is exactly what our nation needs – a pandemic and an uprising. We needed a force to stop us in our tracks. A virus that stripped away the layers of stories we had told ourselves. An illness that exposed the truth of our society. Its deep racial divides. Black and Latinos disproportionately affected by the virus, disproportionately dying, disproportionately at risk of losing their job, their kids disproportionately failed by remote learning.
“No racist police!”
All of us bottled up in our homes watched as a black man was pinned down in the street, for something that all of us have since forgotten because it was nothing that any human being should ever be pinned down for. We watched as he kicked and then relented, the cop’s knee only pressing deeper onto his throat, two young cops sitting on his back.
“I can’t breathe.”
We listened, trapped in our living rooms, to the story of police pounding on the door in the middle of the night, breaking it free of its hinges. A shot fired by a scared boyfriend, the cracks of gunfire that fired back. Shot dead in her bed. For something none of us even asked about because what really justifies a no-knock warrant?
And then again we listened, when just last week, a judge deemed a wall more sacred than Breonna’s black body.
If we hadn’t all been frozen into place, nowhere to go but our own backyards, would any of this have happened? All of us suddenly waking up to what had been happening all along?
I’m not sure it would have, but I have hope that we have created inertia, that all the shit that’s happened this year will push us to face our greatest weaknesses and invoke radical change.
That hope, though, at times, is smothered. Smothered by the images of protestors fleeing from tear gas, scouring fences as if this were a war we were trying to escape. Smothered by the truth that it was simply for a photo-op as if the president were a teenage girl posting a picture of herself to Instagram. Smothered by the simple fact that our military is being deployed to fight its own people, their shields erect in front of them, their batons placed strategically at their hip. Smothered by the knowledge that when others protested the lockdown orders – mainly white people in Trump hats and guns strapped to their backs — the same use of force was not employed. Smothered by the young Trump supporter who infiltrated a protest, shooting his gun as if this were the solution to people who thought differently than he did.
There are moments in history that divide us into before and after. We learn about them as children – the Tea Party, the Emancipation of Proclamation, Pearl Harbor. And then we experience them for ourselves—the Columbine shooting, September 11. This is another such moment. Our world will be divided into before and after.
My hope for that future is divided as well. On the one hand, I see us emerging from this as a stronger, more cohesive nation who leans on our neighbors and recognizes the power in our differences. And yet, I’m scared that this will only serve to divide us further, that we will emerge with irreparable damage, having learned nothing in the process.
Seeking Clarity 