Yesterday at around 6 p.m., I was sitting on my sister’s balcony on the 31st floor of her apartment building in Brickell, Miami. To the left of my view was the I-95 over downtown, which was clogged with protestors who initially shut down all northbound traffic, and eventually southbound traffic too. The I-95 neighbors the Miami Police Department.
The protests had been going on all over the city — all over the country, all over the northern hemisphere — all day. Protestors chanted “black lives matter” and “George Floyd,” the name of the black man who was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis earlier this week.
Police cleared the causeway of cars and protestors quickly, and soon, smoke billowed to the right of it. Fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars rushed toward the scene. I wondered where the smoke was coming from and soon found that, despite City of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez’s claims that police would not use riot gear during the protests, tear gas was fired to disperse the downtown protestors, who were peaceful throughout their plight. Reports from the ground indicate that police also fired rubber bullets as protestors started to chant, “no justice, no peace.”
Meanwhile, to the right of my view, fireworks erupted over the bay. Beneath me, yachts cruised down the Miami River while blasting reggaeton that drowned out the sound of nearby sirens, and restaurant goers clinked glasses next to the water.
I have always been aware of the dichotomy between black and white in America. After all, it lies deep in our country’s infrastructure. The fact that our neighborhoods are largely segregated by race makes it easy for white people to ignore, or otherwise be totally unaware of, legitimate issues in black communities. But 31 floors up, the issue had never been laid out in front of me like this before.
Of course, demonstrations in other locations turned out much worse than this one. Largely peaceful protests collapsed into nights of chaos, destruction, looting and violence, which started in Minnesota and spread to Columbus, Ohio, Little Rock, Ark., New York, Los Angeles, and more cities around the country.
Outrage has grown nationwide as social media has exposed instances of police brutality. In 2014, a white NYPD officer killed Eric Garner by chokehold. A video of the incident went viral. That same year, white police killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., which prompted local demonstrations and talk about national reform. Six years later, not much has changed.
And yet, while I sat on that balcony, I couldn’t help but think, how can normal life — fun and pleasantly oblivious life — carry on as usual while black people in our country continue to suffer? How can we watch and share a video of a white police officer shoving his knee into a black man’s neck for nearly nine minutes until he dies, despite that black man’s desperate pleas for air, and resume life as normal?
And for my fellow millennials and members of Gen Z, how can we be so tone deaf to continue to take up internet real estate with selfies and bikini pics while the rest of the world is grieving, organizing, and begging for change?
How can we choose to pretend that the injustices against our own American people do not exist?
Enough is enough. White people need to do better. White people need to confront racism and be anti-racist. White people need to join the movement and demand justice.
South African cleric and anti-apartheid and human rights activist Desmond Tutu famously said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Might I add that in this situation, although most people agree that Floyd’s murder is a product of police brutality and abuse of power, it is also important to recognize and admit that this was an act of racism.
Online, many posts declaring “Black Lives Matter” have been met with comments along the lines of “but all lives matter,” and “white people get killed by the police too,” and “we will never know if these police officers were racially motivated.”
But “black lives matter” is not an exclusionary demand; it’s a cry for a shift in statistical numbers that show that black men and boys are more than twice as likely as white men and boys to die during an encounter with the cops. That’s 1 in 1,000 black men in America that can expect to die at the hands of the police. In fact, getting killed by the police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America.
So yes, white people are killed at the hands of the police every year, but not at this rate.
And perhaps the cop himself was not racially motivated (doubtful), but that doesn’t excuse the structural racism of the police system itself. The claim that the system is racist is often met with deep skepticism from the right, despite the fact that most people of color have a story, or know someone who has a story, that describes unfair treatment by the police. But to say that the police establishment is systemically racist is not to say that everyone in the system is racist. It means that the system produces racially disparate outcomes, regardless of the intentions of the people who work within it. When you consider that much of the criminal-justice system was designed and built during the Jim Crow era — an era of laws that purposefully enforced racial segregation to disenfranchise black people and remove their political and economic gains — this is pretty intuitive.
In the early 20th century, lynchings emerged as a scare tactic to control black people and black movements. Journalist and civil rights leader Ida B. Wells-Barnett reported in her book, “The Red Record,” that the lynchings of black Americans were planned in advance and fully supported by the local police. In fact, police often participated in the white mobs that organized and perpetrated the lynchings.
As the civil rights movement gained momentum, activists were constantly, and often violently, targeted by police who worked with white civilians to block black efforts to obtain civil and political rights.
I could go on, but I’d write a book. It’s no surprise that, with a foundation like this one, some influence from that era still lingers in our criminal justice system today. It was built by white people for the exclusive protection of white people.
That’s why, as you’ve probably read at least a few times by now, all lives can’t matter until black lives matter.
To be clear, that’s not an anti-white or anti-cop thing to say. Acknowledging your privilege as a white person is not to say that your life is easy. It just means that, of all the legitimate obstacles you face in your life, your race will never be one of them.
And although the news media seemingly delivers more stories about bad cops than good cops, there is no denying that good cops exist. A social media post has recently recirculated in which comedian Chris Rock comments on police brutality. “Some jobs can’t have bad apples. Some jobs, everybody’s gotta be good,” he said. “Like pilots. American Airlines can’t be like, ‘Most of our pilots like to land.'” In the same way that a pilot who fails to land a plane can spoil the reputation of an airline, a cop who fails to serve and protect the people can tarnish the reputation of the police establishment. In either situation, systemic change is vital for the livelihood of both the organization and the people it serves.
And so, fellow white people, it is crucial that we make a shift from being defensive of ourselves and our own broken institutions, to proactively addressing, fixing, and educating ourselves and our communities about the structural racism that our black counterparts still face. If you cannot protest, show solidarity by signing a petition for change in legislation. Make a donation to a social justice group like Black Lives Matter or the ACLU, or another group, but research it first to ensure your money is being appropriately allocated. Support black businesses. Don’t worry about your social media aesthetic and use your platform to repost something about the movement and educate your followers on the need for systemic change. If you see a policeman degrading a black person, step in by asking for a badge number and recording the scene. Defend black people and acknowledge their experiences as valid, but do not speak over them. Let them know that you stand with them. Acknowledge and be okay with the fact that white privilege exists.
EDIT – 6/2/20 at 11:40 p.m.:
RESOURCES (links):
Here are some ways you can take action now.
If you would like to relay any additional resources, feel free to email me at kvsideris@gmail.com, or drop a comment, identified or anonymous, below.
kiki 
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