Oh, America.
If the goal was for us to look at a white man, especially for the world to look at a white American man in uniform, with mistrust and contempt, then mission accomplished, Minneapolis PD.
The same goes to every police department in the United States of America that has ever been involved with the killing of a black or brown person – anyone, really – in clear instances of gross abuse of power and racism. We have felt and seen your brazen, repeated, seemingly relished cultural lashings, in particular the last four years.
You must be so damn proud.
Keep going. By all means.
We see you, ignorant, caucacious, fugly folk bent on claiming nothing and no one you own as yours, and we won’t let you get away with it. We will not let you divide us. We’re better than that because, hell yeah, we are better than you.
And now for a “fun” fact: This past March was the first in an entire generation (18 years) not to be violently disrupted by a school shooting.
Traumatized children were not able to kill other children this spring. That, my friends, was one of the considerable pluses of the deadly, ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, though. (May the planet continue to enjoy its time without us as much as possible.)
I have teenaged (white) nephews graduating high school this year and during the next few years. They have consistently experienced that violence in their lives all their lives, and all their lives they have born witness to an America that doesn’t care about or properly values black and brown and non-white people the same way it cares about about exerting dominance. My American-Peruvian niece became a teenager last year. If I who have straddled the line of bicultural identity – having lived in the United States of America 20 years (more than half my life) – can feel adrift in the face of so much injustice and fuckery here in my chosen home, I cannot imagine how she must feel, indeed.
I hope and trust the traumatized parents raising them and every kid here and everywhere were wise to check in on their spawn meaningfully this season of self-isolation. All of us ought to have looked within, now that we have had the time and seen and confirmed how disposable some of us are, and how slow justice still is to be pursued and served for the lot of us.
We just want to live. We just want to breathe. We all deserve to be.
Rise above it and shine anew, America – but shine for real and for all.
King of Cups 