Many people feel hopeless; many people feel angry, scared, exhausted and numb. Black American people are being publicly targeted for state violence, and in the coming days will also be the targets of interpersonal violence in many forms, including having explanations and justifications demanded of them, being bombarded with traumatizing videos and images, and having to interact with people who were able to immediately forget that these deaths have happened because they don’t consider them important, if they even knew about them in the first place. It’s a hard time and a good time to be gentle with each other, and if you aren’t Black, to decenter yourself and your thoughts and feelings on this, and instead to talk to members of your own community about the need for change.
I don’t know where we go from here because those of us who recognize the injustice are not the problem. Law enforcement, militarized and indifferent to black lives, is the problem. Law enforcement that sees black people as criminals rather than human beings with full and deserving lives is the problem. A justice system that rarely prosecutes or convicts police officers who kill innocent people in the line of duty is the problem. That this happens so often that resignation or apathy are reasonable responses is the problem.
