In the Wake of George Floyd: Thoughts on Privilege, Race, and Justice
By Taylor Logeman
Unveiling Evil
Today, on June 7th, marks two weeks since the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And for two weeks, people nationwide and even in other countries (England, France, Germany, even New Zealand) have taken to the streets. They cry out in anguish, in anger, fueled by the stress, anxiety, and cabin fever of the past three months in quarantine in precaution toward COVID-19.
I woke up on Thursday, May 28th, I woke up to find the video on Instagram. My younger sister had posted it, though I hadn’t realized what it was until a warning image popped up that I’d never seen before - a monochromatic page solemnly warning that graphic content would follow, tap here to continue watching. Wtf? If my sister posted it, I reasoned, how bad could it be? So, curiously, I tapped my phone screen to beckon it forward.
What followed was horrifying. In a ten-minute clip filmed by a bystander, police officers were behind a cop car. One standing, the other, kneeling...on the neck of handcuffed Minneapolis resident George Floyd - a name I’d seen briefly in my news emails that week, now no longer just a name.
It didn’t take much to piece things together. Floyd was an African American. Was...he died hours after the incident at the hospital. The officer pinning his neck was white.
I forced myself to watch the entire video, afraid of how I would feel. I watched Floyd’s desperate pleas, begging for the literal right to air - “I can’t breathe,” he gasped repeatedly. “I can’t breathe.” Through choked sobs, he pleaded again and again, never appearing to resist arrest, as the white man hovering over him, sinister and emotionless, slowly squeezed life from Floyd’s body. I would find out later why he was arrested - for attempting to pay with counterfeit money.
Suddenly, on an unfamiliar level, something in me cracked. Sobs shook my body as I lay curled up in the safety of my bed, watching this man’s breathless pleas subside and his helpless body go limp, dark liquid pooling around his face on the ground, mashed into the street. I shut my phone off and wept, confused and anguished for someone who didn’t deserve to die.
My thoughts tumbled together in a dark swarm, my mind growing murky and fuddled. The officer, had he no humanity? Who raised him? Or was this the simple and otherwise unexplainable truth I know in my own faith, that darkness is inherent in all of us, that the heart of no man is truly good? This simply happened to be his? There couldn’t be a simple answer to this.
Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old black woman, was shot by Louisville police when they executed a no-knock warrant while she slept in her home on March 13. The shooting took place when the home Taylor, a front-line health care worker, shared with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, was raided by three plainclothes officers. Police said the no-knock warrant was related to drugs.
Moreover...why now? Names and stories like this have been appearing in my vicinity for years. Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Now Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery. And I felt shame, for never having felt this affected by what now seemed like an unignorable pattern. Then again, I’d never seen video footage of something this graphic and heinous, in real life.
So for the past two weeks, I read, and listened, and watched. I leaned into things I didn’t understand, hungry to learn everything I could. I reached out to a few friends of color to see if they were doing okay. One replied in a video, saying she’d since grown numb to events like these, because they’d been happening for so long. I thought about how frequently and how long she’d had to endure this in her face for her to eventually numb herself, to live, to survive.
Hesitantly, I revisited the term “privilege,” one I’d hated for years, as it had only ever been a label to slap on my person as a means to degrade. I hated the way it felt when others seemed to resent the way I’d grown up, something I had no influence over.
“White privilege,” I’d thought, was little more than a resentful outcry aimed at white people from those who spat their hatred, bitter toward those who had more than they did. But privilege, I would learn, means so much more than socioeconomic. It didn’t exist on a singular plane, the way I thought it did.
My dad grew up white. He and all his siblings attended one of the best public high schools in Ohio, ranked third in the state and 106 in the country. He went to a prestigious university where he earned an economics degree. Soon after he would accept a job offer from a massive global company, where he would spend most of his career. He earned raises, developed favor and trust with the customers he sold his products to. He worked hard, and is great at what he does, but as I looked back on the life we had - the comforts we enjoyed, the college degrees my sister and I earned and didn’t need to pay for - I wondered if had my dad worked just as hard but had been born a different color...where would our family be?
Taking Action (Thursday)
I felt an unprecedented need to join in on the change. Yes, I could push myself to learn at home, to question things I’d been taught and not been taught, to check my privilege. But I wanted to get out and join the voices that cried out for justice. So on Wednesday, together my boyfriend and I, joined thousands of others at Thomas Square in Washington, DC. Leaders from Black Lives Matter had gathered about the circle. Traffic had been redirected to circumnavigate our gathering.
Speaking through megaphones, a small cluster of their leadership took turns speaking. They voiced the same anger, frustration, feelings of violatedness and oppression on behalf of the countless. But in turn, they pushed for our protests to stay peaceful, reminding us that God’s love conquers all things, echoing the sentiments of Martin Luther King, Jr., who’d preached a similar message of peace nearly six decades before us.
So, we marched down 16th Street (later that week, on Friday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser would rename and boldly label that stretch of 16th to Black Lives Matter Boulevard.) My partner, law school bound in the fall (currently, with guidance that classes will be held in person, with the stipulation that students must wear masks at all times while on campus) explained to me the illegality of where the military, whose lineup loomed in the distance, now stood.
Black Lives Matter Blvd in DC, via WCTV
I’d never marched before. For as long as I knew what marching in this sense meant, I’d always brushed it off, chalking it up to activities for the purple-haired liberals, the radicals, any groups I didn’t identify with. This felt different. I walked next to my partner and observed the goings-on before me. The juxtaposition of anger, the clever vitriol in some of the signs people held high, paired with the servant-heartedness of those out there serving. Groups dotted the entire route at most intersections, handing out cold bottled water, snacks, even medical supplies like bandaids, gauze, sunscreen, and of course, masks and gloves. Nearly everyone donned a mask, knowing while change for justice was tantamount, we still lived in the midst of a pandemic.
While “Breaking News” headlines on fear-mongering outlets had been touting violence, rioting, and looting as though it were constant and ubiquitous, our group was loud but not aggressive. Chants rang out on a cyclical track:
No Justice, No Peace! No Racist Police!
This is what democracy looks like!
Say his name: GEORGE FLOYD! Say her name: BREONNA TAYLOR!
What do we want? JUSTICE! When do we want it? NOW!
Hey hey! Ho ho! These racists cops have got to go!
Black Lives Maaaa-tter! Black Lives Maaaa-tter!
Friday
On Friday June 5th, my church gathered on the National Mall at the Carousel in front of Smithsonian Castle to walk and pray over our city. About fifty of us met, listened to our pastor Chris Moerman instruct us to walk in silence from our meeting place to the Washington Monument - one mile. We spread out, and surely must have been a baffling spectacle to passers-by - I watched at least a half dozen people stop and ask someone from the group who we were, what we were doing. Before we started two women approached me to ask if we were a running group. When I corrected them, one said with gusto, “Pray for us! Pray for all of us!”
As we neared the Washington Monument, Chris, a friend’s toddler daughter on his shoulders, walked toward a group of soldiers stationed at the base of the monument, to speak with them. When it was clear it was safe for us to draw closer, we hopped from the pathway to the raised lawn and surrounded Chris, adjacent to the fence that now surrounded the monument to keep out graffiti taggers.
And so we worshipped, we prayed. A beautiful spectacle of our right to freedom of speech and religion, we invited God to cover the city and thanked him for inviting us to enact change, all the while as the sun came up from behind the Capitol Building.
Saturday
Saturday was the real big kahuna. Jake and I met again to join the protestors, slated to swell into the biggest protesting event since George Floyd’s death, and we’d later find out, the largest event held in the history of civil rights. Thousands upon thousands of people poured into the District, congregating in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Again speakers took turns singing, citing poetry they’d written, speaking, in the same vicinity where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. One young man shared his own unfortunate moments of coded racism in corporate America, where the CIO of a company he interviewed with, led their meeting with a derogatory comment toward his hair.
From noon until four o’clock that afternoon, we marched all over the District. Temperatures climbed to nearly ninety degrees. Every nine blocks, we’d stop, take a knee, and pause, for the same eight minutes and forty-six seconds George Floyd suffered with Derek Chauvin’s knee on his neck. We heard speakers fire up the crowd, rested, drank water, reapplied sunscreen, knelt in silence for three minutes at the Chinatown’s Friendship Archway.
By the time we walked back to our cars, we’d walked ten miles that day, and reached 21,000 steps. It took me twice as long to get home due to traffic and road closures. By the time I managed to cook dinner and shower off the day, I fell into bed at 8:37
Sunday
Once again, I sat at my kitchen table reflecting on these events, and typing them here. My phone is alit with texts from a string of friends, cautiously curious about the protests, some skeptical, others with enough piqued interest to join us in the next one tonight. I remind myself to be patient with them, knowing I am no better. For years I went about my life blissfully ignorant, until this social justice light bulb went off for me.
This is the most involved I’ve - many of us - have ever been with the civil rights movement. And my hope is that we never stop. May this not shrivel into a hollow fad, where marching becomes the “cool” thing to do because it’s for the young and lively and righteously angry and woke. I pray this continues to swell, that this sparks lifestyle changes beyond mere thought changes, that we shift our focus from the neighbors next door who keep to themselves, to our good friends whom we invite over for dinner and wine. May change never stop and unite us in new waves, levels, and depth.
What about you? How have recent events shaped your outlook on the world?
cover image via KTLA
