Sunday afternoon, and it’s a luxury to plop into the woods and disconnect from social media for a while.  With all the time I’ve spent at home away from my physical job, it’s easy to get lost down that rabbit hole, so I try to make it a point to pull back and unplug as a mental health move.

 

But being able to “disconnect” from the turmoil in the world is a luxury not everyone has today.  Today, violence is ripping through many neighborhoods in America, and for many of my fellow citizens, the luxury of popping into the woods, putting up a hammock by the creekside, and letting thoughts bleed on paper is not a privilege they possess, not only because not everyone lives close enough to a public greenway with hidden little nooks, but also because for many people in this country, the anxiety isn’t a problem of too much time on social media.  It is an existential dread that would follow them into the woods, and likely any street they walk in America.

The day started with a simple intention: go to the BigBox store to buy supplies for a backyard garden project. The news on the radio reminds me that in addition to a pandemic, our country has experienced days of protests in the wake of George Floyd’s gruesome death in Minneapolis.  NPR has a series of updates, and even when they are trying to do a light entertainment interview with Anna Kendrick, the question arises about her reaction.  She says as a white person she has struggle to say something adequate and meaningful.  I feel that.  I make a big Sunday breakfast and indulge in my Sunday buffet of news shows, filled with images, videos, interviews, and people struggling to find something adequate and meaningful to say about Floyd’s death and the ensuing protests.  .

 

By 11:30, I’m in the yard, raking pea gravel like some degenerate monk.  All I have on my plate is to finish this project and finish up my grades for the year.  In this pandemic, grades have felt less meaningful than ever.  As the country wakes up after another night of protests and struggle, that feeling sits in the pit of my stomach.

 

It takes me back to 2016, and a post I wrote about protests in Charlotte.  Keith Lamont Scott had been killed, and in Charlotte, we had our own turmoil, where a black man had been killed, when the day time protests turned to night time “riots.”

 

Now it is nationwide.  Now an injustice in Minneapolis is seen as a threat to justice everywhere.

 

It was September of 2016 when this went down.  The start of a new school year.  The time where we try to get into a groove, good habits to carry us through an academic year.  But I remember a palpable fear among my African American students.  For them, school had never felt less meaningful, less able to gird them against the pressing struggles of the world.  For them, Scott’s death was an existential threat, a recognition of the danger of having darker skin in America.  

 

And as a teacher, I think to myself, what do I do to push this forward?  What do I do to help bring about a more just society in which my students don’t have to grow up in a world with this fear?  Teach essays from African American authors and films by African American directors in the hope that all of my students can identify with this struggle?  How much does that move the needle forward?

 

As this COVID-marred school year winds down, it doesn’t feel like enough today.  All over social media, I have friends posting MLK memes as a way of criticizing the fact that people are protesting–or more specifically, “the way” they are protesting–from the comfort of their digital couch, all the while ignoring the fact that as King sat in jail for illegally protesting, he warned gravely that if we could solve the problems of racial injustice peacefully when he was alive, they would inevitably lead to violence.  And let’s not forget, he was assassinated for being that “disruptive” to society.  Maybe things aren’t as bad as they were in the 60s, but it’s nowhere near as cool as a lot of people think they are.  I hope my students leave my class and grow up to remember the difference.

 

I remember seeing this realization among my students of color: that Keith Lamont Scott or George Floyd could be anyone of them.  There is a distrust built over the years from being told by well-meaning people that they have to be good enough just to be thought to be non-threatening, and even then knowing that that veneer of respectability of could be ripped away by the subjective fear and suspicion of a person with a gun (law enforcement or not) at any time. (For anyone who disputes this, take the time to read Coates’ Between the World and Me, which introduced in literary form “The Talk” that most young African Americans have with their parents about how they will have to interact with the world just to survive.)  

 

So, while I walk down the greenway and sit in a hammock by the creek, and then walk home to dig around in my garden–all with very little actual apprehension that any fear-induced tragedy could or will happen to me–I doubt there are many black men and women that have the same luxury to disconnect from social media, take a seat in nature, and let that be sufficient to ease the ever-present existential threat of pandemic become the ever-present existential threat of American racism.

 

Because even before Floyd’s murder, we are in dire times.  People are anxious about paying their bills, buying food, and keeping a roof over their head.  Lots of us went through this back in 2008.  When the economy gets tight and the poor are forced into eviction or to make economic choices that run afoul of the law, they meet society in the form of the police officer.  Sometimes (as in Breonna Taylor’s case) all they do is go to sleep in the middle of a drug war, thinking they’ll wake up.  Maybe it’s unfortunate that police are often put in the place of quelling the situations that often arise from poverty and inequality–or even enacting the policies that ensure it–but it’s inexcusable for them to do so in a manner that perpetuates fear in the community they serve.  And while it is refreshing to see so many men and women of the law stand or walk  (or better kneel) on the side of justice this time, there is an abundance of wounds that still must heal.

 

And that change isn’t going to happen overnight.  A lot of people are comfortable with giving up their concern over Floyd’s death (or really, any immediate injustice) when they see buildings and police cars ablaze, when they see stores looted, when they hear business owners interviewed about losing all they had wrapped up in their business.  This is where the MLK meme comes out, and it comes out suggesting that all the rioting is perpetuated by black people with the specific use of using violence to push for change.  It happened in 2016, and it’s happening now.  It seems to come off like “you people should cool down if you want things to get better.”  (It’s why many of my black students give white people a sideways glance then they bring up MLK; because he’s the only black intellectual we ever know and we use him as a tool against them.)  But if anyone watches the news as much as I do, we know the violence is coming from lots of places.  We know that many of the protesters detest the violence.  We know that at times police tactics to disperse crowds can be just as violent (like the rubber bullets fired at journalists and people sitting on their porches in Minneapolis).  This is not to excuse or moralize looting and destruction of property.  But any time there is unrest, there are bound to be those for whom violence seems a valid expression.  And when those who use violence as an expression get started, others will see their opportunity to run in and loot.

What makes this particularly challenging this time is that there are myriad groups who have an interest in fomenting discord as opposed to seeking reconciliation, who would seize the opportunity of Floyd’s death to create civil unrest without sharing the goals of rectifying injustice that Floyd’s death should raise in all of us.  A study from Clemson showed that this was happening even during the protests after Scott’s death, where social media accounts intentionally spread disinformation meant to stoke anxiety and perpetuate outrage.  Carnegie Mellon recently published a story that over half of the accounts online pushing disinformation about COVID are bots linked to push disinformation.  Ironically, multiple accounts have been released about the presence of white supremacist groups pushing violence in these urban riots around the country.  For whatever reason, there are many interested parties who see a time of crisis as a ripe opportunity to sow chaos, not for the creative change that could come, but rather for the further destruction they hope for.

 

Which is to say that those of us sitting on our duffs watching this all play out on the news and posting memes on social media should be aware of how our participation plays out on line.  The ideas we spread help define the conversation around this changeEven all the “Boston Tea Party” memes, which seems to support protests, seems an innocuous, detached form of support that could just as easily been spread by those who seek nothing but discord.  It is a luxury to sit back and release pre-made information, then retreat back to our comfortable ideologies that let us spread the ideas that the protesters are lazy, or that a nation returned to religion will solve this, or that this is all a George Soros-baked conspiracy, or that as long as I’ve got enough guns, I don’t have to worry about the needs of other people.

 

At a basic level, I feel we have to get beyond ourselves.  We can’t keep telling ourselves the same old stories to act like this is just going to be okay.  We have look this in the face.  There are many instances in this news cycle of people of different races, coming together in embrace, working together for justice.  We need to know that we have a commitment to that when the fires burn out, when the pandemic fizzles, when we get back to work and all start getting locked into our own individual struggles of writing essays and grading essays and finding meaning and comfort in our own families.  For many of us, it seems like a minor inconvenience; but for many of our fellow citizens, it is a fact of daily life.

 

At some point I get restless in my hammock and decide to head home.  The sun lowering, and while that has meant more conflict in cities around the country, it means I’m getting in my back yard to put plants in the ground.  But I hop on social media before I go out and find a message from a student with whom I’ve reconnected over this issue, who was in my 2016 class.  We mused over this hopeless, powerless feeling.  I felt strangely ironic confessing that to her, as it would be easier for me to ignore all this than it would be for her to do so.  After all, she has more to fear in this situation than I do.  I’m the one with the lazy Sunday in a hammock.  She’s challenged me to write this conclusion eight different ways.  None of them are satisfying in the cohesive rhetorical sense of the word.  

 

Because I want to tie this up with a hopeful twist that I’m going to work to be meaningful change, and let this infuse my teaching practice, and how I think about Allen Ginsburg who ranted about America and then claimed he was going to get to the work to move this country forward.  And I want to create a metaphor about my garden and a safe place for my students to grow.

 

Except that’s exactly where my head was four years ago, having these same swirling thoughts, trying to come to the same exact conclusion.

 

And now I’m white on a Wednesday and this is happening again.  The president gassed peaceful protesters outside the White House last night.  This morning, I heard a story about a fifteen year old boy who loves to run track, but his mom won’t let him run outside during this pandemic–not because he might get sick, but because she knows that a young black men running down the street can easily be thought a suspect, and we are reminded often how being thought a suspect can take a quick and deadly turn.  It’s not a new thought.  Brent Staples posed that problem in “Black Men in Public Spaces.” (1986)  Garnette Cadogan posed it in “Walking While Black” (2016).  I was trying to get to a good metaphoric point that allowed me to make sense of this and move forward, but as I sit in my empty classroom and watch Do The Right Thing (1989), overwhelmed of the film that both captured its own time and continues brutally live in our own,  thinking about how I can screen it next year, wondering if this bit of teaching will make a difference, I realize that it won’t.  At least not by itself.  

 

 And there is an irksome, irritating rage that we as Americans have to have the same problem over and over and over, and still not figure out how to solve it.  And there’s the knowledge that there’s a whole lot more work to get done before white people can be honest about the struggles we don’t have to think about, struggles that our fellow citizens of color endure daily.  Being white on a Wednesday in America means I could easily shelve that anger and act like it’s somebody else’s problem, or that people could deserve equal treatment if they would just act more respectably, or believing the sanitized version of MLK that shows up a couple of times a year to fool us that everything is cool, or believing that no one really gets killed except as a ginned-up political conspiracy.  Or even writing a blog post about my thoughts and thinking I had done something valuable.  But then I would hopelessly ignorant wondering where this problem came from when it shows up again, wondering “Can’t we all just get along?”  

 

There is no heroic metaphor that ends this musing.  There is no resolution to work harder to make the world a better place.  I will do that regardless.  Today, there is open-ended irritation and rage that stands in the way, lessons we have to keep learning to extend human decency to everyone in this country and construct our society with a basic love and respect for all our fellow Americans, and calling out our fellow citizens when they refuse to meet dictum of Christ to “Love Thy Neighbor”.  It seems a pretty low bar.  Hopefully, one day, we can learn to live up to that simple expectation.