That Week of Fear and Death

We’ve seen it and we can’t turn away. Now we have to do something.

For centuries humans have pleaded for tolerance, for acceptance, for love. That’s because for centuries we’ve warred with one another, mainly over things that could be resolved if only we cared about each other.

We war over territory because somebody else is where we want to be and it should be enough that we want to be there.

We war over differences that are mainly meaningless — like language or culture or deity choices or even skin color — because we’ve been led to believe that some humans are better than other humans, and we, of course, are the better humans.

We war over dominance. The whole world has a dominance streak and because we can’t all dominate, some of us try to temper it by suggesting that maybe if we cared about each other the world would be — I don’t know — a better place?

It’s a matter of survival, and it’s the kind of thing we shouldn’t dare forget. We can’t survive without each other. We build communities, we create havens, villages, oases, sanctuaries, forts…and we’re a part of them. They’re for us.

But what about them?

When our kids were small we rented a house in a neighborhood full of little brick bungalows. We were all blue-collar families but it was still near the middle of the 20th century so most of the neighborhood women were full-time, stay-at-home moms. Everyone on the block knew everyone else’s kids, and, as far as we moms were concerned, every one of them had a place under our collective wings. We praised them, we yelled at them, our eagle eyes were always on them. Or so we thought.

My son and the little boy across the street were happy wanderers, ready to see the world through their four-year-old eyes whenever they could slip away. One day they disappeared. Just vanished. I didn’t have a car and neither did the other little guy’s mom. Neither did the neighbor next door, but she had a brother who was a cop. She called him, but as she was describing our boys, down to the clothes they were wearing, they were spotted skipping on the sidewalk at the end of the block, as if nothing they had done was any cause for panic.

That should have been the end of it, but our neighbor knew her brother was close by so she asked him to catch up with them and basically scare the daylights out of them. And he did. He drove alongside them, rolled down his window and yelled to them: “Hey! Where do you think you’re going? Your mamas are looking for you. You boys better get home!”

They ran home crying, the police car following with flashing lights. The cop/brother gave them a final warning, stifling a smile, and left them to their moms. Our boys were safe. They stayed close to home. Life went on.

As I think about it now — and I haven’t thought about it for decades — I realize our only fear for our sons was that they would be lost and scared or that they might try to cross a busy street. It didn’t occur to us that there might be any other danger out there. We had no doubt other neighbors would watch out for them.

We were white.

Over the years, as I’ve heard and read those horrific stories about Black and Brown children being hurt or killed in situations where white children would have been safe, I’ve tried to picture myself as a mom working to keep my dark-skinned children from harm in an environment where danger is real and palpable. Ever present. Where law enforcement may or may not be there to protect my precious children. Where I would have to send them out into a world that wouldn’t love or appreciate them as I did, that wouldn’t see anything but the color of their skin.

I can’t.

That feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever someone I love is hurting is almost always temporary. It ends when the incident is over. I can breathe easy again. Families of color never have that luxury. After all these years of fighting discrimination in a country where we crow on about liberty and freedom, in a century when we should be far beyond skin color as a reason for anything, we’re in crisis mode again.

Last Sunday Daunte Wright was killed by Kim Potter, a policewoman who claims she was only going to taser him but shot him at close range with her Glock ‘by mistake’. It was a minor traffic stop. Daunte was 20 years old and the father of a young child. He had called his mother for his car insurance info, so it was clear he wasn’t going to flee. Moments later he was dead. The officer who shot him has resigned and has been charged with his murder. But nothing will ever bring him back.

We’ve been watching this case unfold all week, along with the trial of Derek Chauvin, the officer who relentlessly, and with obvious malice, pressed his knee on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, leaving no possible doubt that George would ever rise again. Both cases happened in the Minneapolis area, but they could have happened anywhere.

This was the week we learned that Second Lieutenant Caron Nazario, a black and Hispanic soldier based in Virginia, was driving his brand-new car with a temporary cardboard plate in the back window when he was pulled over for a ‘missing plate’. The traffic stop escalated, ending in the soldier being pepper-sprayed directly into his face. He was wearing his military fatigues. He thought he was going to die. We only know about it now because Nazario has decided to sue.

Yesterday we had access to a video of a large white man — a soldier, it turns out — screaming at a young black man for daring to walk in broad daylight in a ‘good’ neighborhood in Columbia, South Carolina. If there’s a backstory to this confrontation we don’t know it yet, but watching a white bully looming over and harassing a young black man is a trigger for emotions already frayed by watching clip after clip of white supremacist bullies threatening people of color for no other reason than because they can.

In Chicago, news of the fatal shooting of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old boy who had been accused of drawing a gun on police officers when he was cornered in an alley two weeks ago, became public after release of the video this week shows no sign of the child pulling a gun on anyone. His hands, in fact, were raised in surrender.

All of this in ONE WEEK.

What will next week bring? Will Derek Chauvin’s jury come back with a guilty verdict, or will he walk? I know one thing: George Floyd will not come back and his family will never get over the way he had to die.

Will Kim Potter be made to pay for shooting Daunte Wright point blank? I hope so. But Daunte is gone and his family has lost a shining light. That won’t change.

Adam Toledo’s name will be on our lips and we won’t forget him. We promise. But his family wants the one thing they’ll never have. They want him back.

These stories, these deaths, these abuses, so unnecessary, so wrong, are condensed into one week’s time — one week — while the list of attacks on people of color who have done nothing to deserve such abuse is endless and ongoing. How are we to react, now that we’ve seen it with our own eyes?

Besides skin pigmentation, the common denominator in each of these cases is video evidence. We’ve seen it. We can’t turn away. We can’t forget it. Those of us who care about these things will never forget it.

This is the week that should put to rest any question about the need to end the violence perpetrated by those who gave an oath to protect our citizens. It’s not enough to grieve with the families or to agonize over the heinous acts. We have to change the very atmosphere that creates that kind of privileged violence. A badge or a military uniform gives no one permission to do harm.

We cry together after the damage is done — after it’s too late — and wring our hands in frustration, desperate to put an end to the inhumanity that allows our own to be put in harm’s way. Yet it happens again and again and again.

So what now? If I had the answers this entire piece would have been about solutions. Does it help that I cry when I write about it? Not in the slightest.

Could I come up with a list of 10 things we should be doing to protect people of color from harmful, lethal outcomes that wouldn’t happen if they were white? I could.

Would anyone with real authority listen to one lone woman who might as well be whispering into a cloud for all the good her voice does? We know the answer to that one.

But what if we came together as a nation-wide community with a force nobody could deny and demanded not just justice-come-too-late, but an end to the violence that is all too commonplace? What if we were the neighborhood? What if we watched out for one another, for each other’s children? What if it became such a thing we wouldn’t even have to think about it.

We’d just do it.

Ramona Grigg’s political blog, Ramona’s Voices, ran for 12 years, from Obama to Biden. She is a long-time columnist, feature writer, and essayist leaning Liberal, for the people, against fascism, sedition, insurrection, and other signs of national stupidity. She runs the Medium publication, Indelible Ink.