First off, an admission. We would not be posting this if not for the Milwaukee Bucks’ strike yesterday. I’d seen the video of Jacob Blake’s shooting and had been following the subsequent events in Kenosha, so we were aware of what had happened and was happening, but we didn’t react until the Bucks placed the matter front and center in our consciousness. So, credit and gratitude to the Bucks in a selfish sense, for pushing us from our place of comfort.
As we knew would be the case, posting black squares on our Instagram pages a short while after George Floyd was killed did not end systemic racism. This isn’t to disparage that social media movement—there’s room for that from those more knowledgeable on such things than I am, but personally, I still land in the camp of thinking that was a positive happening, on the whole, and I don’t regret my own participation. No, this isn’t to put down the black squares. Instead, it’s to acknowledge that this shit takes a while. A long, long while.
We published these two posts at the time:
- Action You Can Take: Contacting Your State and Local Elected Officials
- Action You Can Take: Contacting Your Federal Representatives
As well as these two, later in the month of June:
- Support Your Local HBCU
- Qualified Immunity, Constitutional Rights, and the Need for Congress to Do Something
All four are still relevant, but it should be added that now is a good time to listen, because Black voices are speaking. It should be added that now is a good time to try to be kind, because goodness knows our poorer instincts can prevail in times of emotional discourse. It should be added that now is a good time to sit and really think about the situations of race and policing and so many other things in America and in the world, and to invite others to do the same, working patiently through the “well, what about…” bullshit and false equivalences and all the other excuses and distractions comfortable people like us—the vast majority of this blog’s writers and readers are comfortable people, in a socioeconomic sense—use to try to shield our brains from the necessary act of reconsidering our opinions and beliefs. It’s ok to have disagreements. This isn’t a situation requiring fealty to one doctrine of thought. But it’s not ok to take a small disagreement or a messy detail and allow it to convince us that change somehow isn’t needed, or that change somehow isn’t needed from us and from our systems.
One of the most effective pieces of what the Milwaukee Bucks did yesterday was force us to sit with this all, and think about this all, and hopefully recognize the reality of this all. So, again, credit and gratitude to those basketball players in the most selfish of senses, for pushing us from our place of comfort.
