OPINION: It is time to take a stance against racism

Black people live every day with a never-too-far fear of hate, spite and envy

george-floyd-death-racism [File] Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd's neck | via AFP

I saw that video (George Floyd's killing) from the United States, and it left me feeling like I had a knee on my throat. Still, I cannot even begin to feel like my black friends who have lived with that knee on their necks all their lives in the hands of police, and often in the hands of people like you and me.

Black people live every day with a never-too-far fear of hate, spite, jealousy, and envy that are the undercurrent of a racism that could sprout without a moment’s notice. In just the last few years, killed by police in the United States in highly questionable police actions are a long list of African-Americans. Their names:

Eric Garner, Philando Castile, John Crawford, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, Dante Parker, Michelle Cusseaux, Laquan McDoland, George Mann, Tanisha Anderson, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Rumain Bisbon, Jerame Reid, MatthewAjibade, Frank Smart, Natasha McKenna, Tony Robinson, Anthony Hill, Mya Hall, Phillip White, Eric Harris, Walter Scout, William Chapman II, Alexia Christia, Brendon Glenn, Victor Manuel Larosa, Johnathan Sanders, Freddie Blue, Joseph Mann, Salvado Ellswood, Sandra Bland, Albert Joseph Davis, Darrius Stewart, Billy Ray Davis, Samuel Dubose, Michael Sabbie, Brian Keith Day, Christian Taylor, Troy Robinson, Asshams Pharoah Manley, Felix Kumi, Keith Harrison McLeod, Junior Prosper, Lamontez Jones, Patterson Brown, Dominic Hutchinson, Anthony Ashford, Alonzo Smith, Tyree Crawford, India Kager, La’vante Briggs, Michael Lee Marshall, Jamar Clark, Richard Perkins, Nathaniel Harris Pickett, Benni Lee Tignor, Miguel Espinal, Michael Noel, Kevin Matthews, Bettie Jones, Quintonio Legrier, Keith Childress Jr., Janet Wilson, Randy Nelson, Antronie Scott, Wendell Celestine, David Joseph, Calin Roquemore, Dyzhawn Perkins, Christopher Davis, Marco Loud, Peter Gaines, Torrey Robinson, Darius Robinson, Kevin Hicks, Mary Truxillo, Demarcus Semer, Willie Tillman, Terrill Thomas, Sylville Smooth, Alton Sterling, Terence Crutcher, Paul O’Neal, Alteria Woods, Jordan Edwards, Aaron Bailey, Ronell Foster, Stephon Clark, Antwon Rose II, Botham Jean, Pamela Turner, Dominique Clayton, Atatiana Jefferson, Christopher Whitfield, Christopher McCorvey, Eric Reason, Michael Lorenzo Dean, Breona Taylor and George Floyd.

The sheer weight of that wall of names takes your breath away. Each a person killed by American police without trial or jury. Killed on the spot. It takes weeks, maybe months, to fire officers involved in these situations, let alone file for criminal accountability. When these police officers face justice, they are most often cleared and their actions deemed “justifiable” by a legislative system that is heavily weighted in their favor. Translation: It is OK to do what they did.

If this is OK, then what are black people supposed to do?

Milan Sime Martinic Milan Sime Martinic

There is a historical trauma in the black community that grows every time another unarmed African-American is killed by the police. When those deaths are no longer local events, they are felt in the heart of every black American, who knows that, but for the grace of god, it could be them. But the whole world is watching now. It must be an exhausting feeling, to cry for those whose lives are fallen by those unjust knives, and feel the devastation of society’s larger emotional indifference. The whole world is feeling it now.

It is righteous indignation that has erupted into demonstrations across 140 American cities: “Stop killing us! Stop killing us and getting away with it!”

This time, all the world is watching. They see a man being tortured to death, begging to have a knee taken off his neck because “I can’t breathe”. A man reverting to an infantile state, talking to his dead mother as he died. They see the indifference of the man whose knee was killing him. They see all the others who did the same and got away with it. The question comes back: If this is OK, then what are black people supposed to do?

Chanting “I can’t breathe”, crowds marched to the US embassy in Ireland. In Dublin, Copenhagen, London, Auckland, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Tehran, Damascus, and Nairobi, people marched; they marched from Addis Ababa to Sydney to Vancouver, often defying quarantine orders and risking their own safety, recognising the global truth that if it happens in America, it can happen anywhere. Herd immunity towards racial indifference and the way American police treat and kill its black citizens was a real possibility. These demonstrations are out to stop that.

That American racism and racial indifference have endured through decades of such unrest stands as a stark symbol of American hypocrisy. Now, the whole world is watching, and hoping this breakdown leads to a breakthrough worthy of the American promise.

There are vile factions, however, that light racist fires and throw red-meat incitements to more violence. The White House itself retweeted a Trump tweet harking back to days of racist shootings, suggesting the US military may be sent in to shoot the looters. Translation: The penalty for black people looting is death. No trial. No mitigation. No waiting. Just death. Now. Black people know in their hears that this would not happen if the rioters were of a different skin color. The American moral devastation is now completing.

Yes, ‘n’ how many times can a man turn his head

And pretend that he just doesn’t see?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind

The answer is blowin’ in the wind

~Classic American ‘60s protest song

Can you feel the sickening fear of being a black man in America, at any moment corralled in a tight circle of power, someone’s knee on your neck as other humans stand by with indifference as the life goes out of you? Can you imagine the reaction of a black man seeing this? Imagine his heart exploding wide with fear? Imagine him wanting to run to a better place but there is no place to run, his prayer that no one kills him—that no one kills another man like him—thickening in his throat. “Will someone care if I die?” Can you imagine living with this fear every single day? Every time you or your child or spouse leaves the house.

Ernest, business owner of an appliance repair services in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, is a black man with two degrees, middle-aged, and gets pulled by the police some six times a year, he says. “[Not] for traffic violations, but on the suspicion of him being a suspect in one crime or another. Mind you, he is in uniform, driving in a work van clearly marked with his business on the side,” relates a client with whom he shared his experiences.

“They ask him about the boxes in his car—parts and pieces of appliances. They ask to see his invoices and ask him why there is money and checks in his invoice clipboard. They ask if he is selling drugs…He is the one who has to explain himself, although they have no real cause to question him.”

In such instances, he is afraid for his safety. That is an emotion not unfamiliar to any black person in America. Ernest accepts it as a “white man’s world” and does not work after dark because he wants to live.

It should be enough to fracture our hearts. The color of the skin is an obvious feature driving this false categorisation of people based on erroneous perceptions, on negative stereotypes, on the sewage mire that provides the permission slip to the dark side of people’s minds to suppress any emerging sympathy, to hurt, to damage, to kill a black person simply because of their race.

To belong to the club called humanity is a birthright. We are all supposed to be a brotherhood of humans on Earth. All of us. The time is now to take high note of those pictures of black death in the streets and to reach deep into our humanity, to reach deep into our souls and feel the devastation on our common humanity. How can a human being hear another say “I can’t breathe and not stop? How could others in position of authority stand by and do nothing. How is such malicious disregard for human life possible?  How could there not be any justice for the dead black man? That is what the demonstrations and unrest around the globe are about—racial indifference.

Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannon balls fly

Before they're forever banned?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind

The answer is blowin' in the wind…

How. Can. A. Human. Being. Hear. Another. Say. ‘I. Can’t. Breathe’. And. Not. Stop?

I am heartbroken.

Milan Sime Martinic is a writer and researcher. His debut novel IRONWAY: Watching over Benjamin Hill, was translated into five languages