BlackLivesMatter

2020 Is Not the Problem, but It Might Be an Ultimate Solution

Well, it’s about time!

We are the same people when we walked right into this year, but we will hopefully change for the better by the end of it.

It was the same norms and plans for most of the countries in the world when we all cheered and celebrated the first day of January not knowing that things will never be the same again.

From a virus that broke the status quo and forces men to be friends for the sake of survival, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands in such a short period; to a man gasping for the air to breathe, handcuffed, and with a knee carrying the weight of a grown man causing his demise from this world.

To say that the entire world is hurting right now would be a gross understatement. — Steve Campbell

A lot has happened and plenty is still going on.

The year 2020 has seen its just share of major memorable events in a little over five months. And this year will go down into history books as a turning point for a lot of things, paying the price of decades of wrongdoings.

Let’s examine the facts.

Brian Whitaker a journalist for the British daily newspaper — The Guardian once mentioned that:

Racism is a worldwide phenomenon. In some countries it’s met with disapproval, in others with denial.

What is happening of recent is just a single case of it. Thousands of people are being discriminated against, globally, for the color of their skins which is one of the dumbest things imaginable, yet it happens.

Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Nina Pop were all killed in this year. And these are just the cases in America or what the media managed to reveal.

To say the numbers are beyond that is not speculation, the rest just happened to be buried in statistics.

It is worthy to mention a similar incident that happened in 2014 — the death of Eric Garner, who was also killed by police in the streets and coincidentally with the last words of “I can’t breathe..”, just like George Floyd’s.

And his crime? A suspicion of selling single cigarettes from packs without tax stamps. All the choking was Garner’s “resisting” arrest.

I might not be an American, and don’t have to be, to see that these are human beings, not dogs. Not even dogs deserved to be killed on the streets because they are “black” or whatever reason one could muster to mask this fact.

They didn’t make themselves so, and there is nothing wrong with being black, to begin with.

These are parents with little children at home, brothers, sons, and close friends of other people.

These are people with dreams and life goals, that wanna live a normal life without being scared of being “mistakenly” shot in the head on their way to the grocery store.

But again, as I mentioned above, 2020 is not the problem. We walked right into this year with these same problems. People didn’t begin hating on other people after the alarm sounded midnight on January 1st of this year.

Take a look at this:

“…beyond [known peoples of black West Africa] to the south there is no civilization in the proper sense. There are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. They live in thickets and caves, and eat herbs and unprepared grain. They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings. Therefore, the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals.”

Those are the words of the 14th-century Tunisian scholar Ibn-Khaldun.

Racism has its basis not when slaves are captured from military conquests. But when Europeans used the advantage they had of their then technology and firearms to plunder Africa’s wealth and take slaves.

The saddest part of this is that both the slavers and slave-owners tried to justify what they were doing, tagging it as a form of philanthropy. That they were saving those people because they had no identity or culture and lived like savages, whatsoever.

This was the 14th century, my dear reader, almost six hundred years back and it is still hunting that generation (now my generation). This is not a problem that emerged because someone was killed in the 90s, 2014 or 2020. It was an outcome of a deliberate selfish oppressive decision many decades ago.

But all that ends today, hopefully.

There has never been a better time to speak so everybody can hear you than now. I meant that in every literal sense of the word.

I suppose you are nodding affirmatively if you have been paying attention to the latest global trends.

People of voice and that is everybody, have been using it effectively to try to bring about the change that might be one of the biggest marks on racism in the world, or even better, the end of it.

But that will not be possible until previous issues have been addressed, and all 2020 did, is give us a chance to be humans again, all of us.

Use your voice to speak against racial injustice, it is still needed, now more than ever!