A couple of weeks ago, I got a call on my office voicemail from a local gentleman who was incensed. He had gone to his credit union to deposit some money, and was told that two of his $100 bills were counterfeit. Obviously they couldn’t count them in his deposit, and they couldn’t return them either. He was out $200.
We returned his call, but he may have cooled down after having his money confiscated by the authorities (we wrote a story about how the Secret Service deals with funny money when it is found), because he never returned our calls.
This man lost $200 because somewhere he got passed two phony bills.
But you know what didn’t happen?
He wasn’t dragged out of the establishment in handcuffs, stuffed into a police car and beaten, then dragged out onto the pavement where a police officer, sworn to uphold the law, kneeled on his neck for 8 minutes 46 seconds as he begged for his life. He didn’t cry for his mother, telling them he couldn’t breathe, as he suffocated while two other police officers sat on his prone body, and a fourth stood idly by, even as witnesses filmed and begged the officers to let him go.
But that’s what happened to George Floyd, who paid for his purchases at a convenience store in Minneapolis with what was suspected to be a counterfeit $20. Chances are he didn’t know it was counterfeit, and early reports of his paying with a bad check or committing forgery, tried to criminalize what was most likely an honest mistake.
Many people probably couldn’t spot a good forged bill, but as a cashier once told me, as she confiscated a forged $20 from the person paying for purchases in front of me, “I handle money so much, I can tell the difference.”
The 17-year-old clerk, who made the call to the authorities, wasn’t trying to send Mr. Floyd to his death. The authorities, police, FBI, state police, are usually called so the Secret Service can do their “contact tracing” to figure out where the bills come from.
She has been traumatized by what happened right there in broad daylight. We have been traumatized too.
But we’ve been traumatized for centuries — not days, weeks, months, or even years.
And we’ve been angry because we haven’t been heard. Conservatives love to quote Dr. Martin Luther King’s words of nonviolence, but he was despised and targeted by the government while he was alive. And make no mistake — plenty cheered when he was assassinated.
In the meantime, the systemic racism that kills black and brown people with impunity, that turns its back and demonizes followers of Islam, that doesn’t bother to acknowledge the violent deaths of transgendered people, is working as it was meant to work. This system isn’t broken.
The current administration was swept into office not by economic anxiety, but by people who didn’t care about, or who condoned his racism — the fear that white people were being left behind, that they were being treated as less than. You know, like black and brown people.
But my anger doesn’t just stem from what is happening in cities all over the country, where police have become vigilante executioners as citizens take to the streets in protest.
My anger comes from the system that defends the people who believe they are better than all of us who have more melanin, and are willing to weaponize the police to get what they want.
It’s the microaggressions of telling a wrestler that he must cut his hair or forfeit his match, the charter school that allows white girls to dye their hair, but tells black girls that wearing braids is “a distraction.” It’s the infantilizing of white children but perceiving black children as adults, super predators or monsters. It’s a school police officer handcuffing a young black six-year-old girl for having a meltdown.
It’s the liberal Democrat white woman in Central Park, who decided that a black man should die from police violence for the crime of asking her to leash her dog. Yes, she knew from her hysterical play-acting (as she choked her own dog, who was struggling to breathe) that saying an African-American man was threatening her and her dog would bring the cops out, guns blazing.
It’s the peaceful black protesters being pepper sprayed and tear gassed while the white protestors loot and throw rocks at the police. It’s the police, taking up military weapons to unleash on American citizens. It’s two white men chasing down an unarmed black jogger and shooting him to death while a third man filmed it — and being let go by their friends on the force until the video was made public.
It’s a young woman, an EMT first responder, being shot to death in her bed by plainclothes police serving a no-knock warrant to the wrong house, for a man who had no connection to the homeowner — and who was already in custody. And they still haven’t been charged with anything.
I’m angry that police officers in New York handed out masks to white park patrons who weren’t observing social distancing guidelines, but slung black citizens to the sidewalk when they visited each other on their blocks.
And it’s still this administration that calls for law and order while being the most corrupt, chaotic and incompetent group of individuals (approximately 34 individuals and three companies have been indicted or pleaded guilty to a crime) ever tasked to run a country. It’s the president who tweets “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” It’s the sycophant vice president who tweets about being OK with peaceful protests, after he hypocritically wasted more than $300,000 in taxpayer money to show up at a football game and then leave when players take a knee in silent, peaceful protest.
It’s people who start any talk about Black Lives Matter with “yes, but.”
I’m angry that I have to worry about every young man and woman of color when they leave their homes, not because they live in a poor neighborhood, or because of gang violence — but because if they are in a car, or shopping in a store, or standing in a park with their friends, or running, laughing, or existing, they are deemed suspicious.
I’m angry that people keep saying “not all cops” and “not all white people,” but don’t do a damn thing to change the status quo, because they’re still benefiting from it.
So yes, I’m angry. And if you’re not angry — I’m angry at you too.
