![]() ![]() African people and people of African descent have been suffering under these systems of oppression-without respite-for OVER 400 years. Because we must understand that the nature of the way that this land was dominated and colonized and developed means that my experience as a parent of color in 2020 is grossly different from those who are white.Īnd before we even do that let’s set the record straight. ![]() I, an African American mother of a beautiful young man who is spookily smart and gifted and one of the most caring people I have ever met, would, without hesitation, lay down my life for him.īut this is where history is important and where too many of our paths diverge. I know what you’re thinking: “So would we all.” I write this because I have a son for whom I would lay down my life in a second. I write this because I have two brothers with whom, growing up, I shared countless little things like candy bars and secrets and arguments over who got the remote control brothers who took the blame for me when windows got broken at home and defended me from bullies at school brothers who make me laugh like no one else can. I write this short personal reflection because, like many of us, I was heartbroken and enraged by having to, yet again, bear witness to a Black man - someone’s son, father, brother, cousin, friend- being murdered by a white police officer as other officers stood by. People of color must take up the space to speak our truths. ![]() Congress about the injustices she faced as a black woman sharecropper was blocked for fear of the outrage that her truth-telling would unleash. Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist whose 1964 testimony before U.S. George Floyd on Memorial Day (a holiday that originated with newly freed African Americans in 1868, by the way) I stopped to linger over the photo of an African American woman holding up a sign that read, “I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired.” Her sign, poignant in its simplicity, recalls the famous statement by Mrs. While browsing the countless images of protestors of racial injustice in the wake of the murder of Mr. ![]()
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