Black Americans Don’t Want a Return to “Normal”
The recent announcement that an effective coronavirus vaccine is in production and will soon be available and distributed has many Americans breathing a sigh of relief that our lives will soon return to “normal.” I, however, don’t want a return to the Before Times and the United States of Amnesia. And while it may be presumptuousness, I don’t believe other Black folks do either.
When the gruesome video displaying the public lynching of George Floyd at the hand of a white Minneapolis police officer emerged in the midst of a global pandemic millions of white Americans, confined to their homes, could no longer turn away nor feign ignorance about state- sanctioned violence against unarmed Black men and women.
It’s sickening how our ancestors, elders, and children — from George Stinney, the youngest American ever to be executed to Attiana Jefferson, Angelo “AJ” Crooms and Sincere Pierce — have been robbed of their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, essentially, the ability to live a “normal” life because of the racism and intransigence surveillance that pervades the movement of the Black body in America.
The coronavirus has been catastrophic for Blacks and Indigenous people who have been disproportionately affected due to this country’s unreconciled structural inequalities in health care, housing, and economics.
I don’t want a return to a world where white men, who are domestic terrorists, are cloaked by the mainstream media in the language of so-called “armed militias” and permitted to freely open-carry rifles to state capitols while calling for liberation from their face masks. While little Black boys are gunned down in broad daylight for playing with a toy gun in a neighborhood park. I don’t want a return to a world where another generation of students is preoccupied with active shooter drills because GOP-leaders lack the courage to defy lobbyists and pass a bill banning civilian ownership of military assault weapons.
I also don’t want a return to a world where a Black woman peacefully asleep in her home or a Black man jogging in his neighborhood are not considered “normal” because they’re not white.
I don’t want a return to a world where the cloud of “the talk” shackles a Black child’s innocence, wonder, and curiosity to freely explore the world, while white children, unburdened by their hue, are given the benefit of the doubt and presumed innocent in any situation no matter their noncompliance with authority. I don’t want a return to a “normal” where Black lives continue to be devalued over white lives and police who kill innocent Black people face no impunity for their actions.
Last summer’s uprisings across the United States were a stark reminder of how, as James Baldwin said, “America is always changing, but it never changes.” Black people are exhausted. We’re tired of being dehumanized. We’re tired of the anti-Black sentiment and assent to structural racism that has prevented us from living our normal lives, for centuries.
The United States is at yet another inflection point. And Black people decided we’re not going back. To be clear, the present occupant of the Oval Office is a symptom, not a cause, of the institutional racism that has been upheld for generations. But he’s fouled, mightily, each time he was passed the ball.
Well-meaning whites who align with our anger and frustration need to do better and do more.
The “normalcy” many white Americans now crave evaporated in November 2016 when white people, across socioeconomic class and gender voted for “grab-‘em-by-the-pussy” patriarchy. That 70 million white people voted for a second-term of near-authoritarianism by a homicidal sociopath is beyond disturbing, should never be forgotten, and can never be normalized.
History will remember Donald Trump as the greatest failure to ever hold the office of the president as he attempted to “normalize” a moment that wasn’t normal.
Copyright © 2021 Jennifer E. Mabry. All Rights Reserved in all Media.
