Black Lives Matter/Juneteenth 2020

It is Juneteenth, Emancipation Day, a day that marks not the moment when President Lincoln outlawed slavery, but the day two and a half years later when the last slaves in Texas were finally told that they were free. Today and all days I stand with the protestors demanding the equality and justice that should always have been theirs. I can’t do so literally, but here, in this virtual space, I stand with feet firmly planted and my written voice raised to say “Black Lives Matter.”

To anyone who wants to jump in with “All lives matter” — don’t. If all lives mattered equally, no one would feel the need to say “Black Lives Matter.” Black Lives Matter reminds us that too often our country, our citizens, and —most notoriously right now — our police act as if Black lives and Brown lives and Indigenous lives are disposable, negligible. Black Lives Matter reminds us that these attitudes, ones that have infected the entire history of our country, must change.

I am neither Black nor Brown and I’m not going to pretend that I understand what it is like to live as a person of color in the United States. I’m not sure what to write that won’t be appropriative or just wrong.

But I know the brutality used against Black communities is wrong — more than wrong; it is wicked, inhuman, sickening, and the national convulsion of anger and grief is the only sane response to the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Rayshard Brooks, murders that are the latest in a long chain of killings. I think it is better to speak out in protest and take a chance of putting my foot in my pen than it is to stay silent.

I’ve been reading around the Internet for education and inspiration:

The New York Time‘s 1619 Project has an extensive archive of articles on the history of slavery and its persistent effects on areas such as medicine, where Linda Villarosa explains that even

Today most commercially available spirometers, used around the world to diagnose and monitor respiratory illness, have a “race correction” built into the software, which controls for the assumption that blacks have less lung capacity than whites.

and that the pain of Black patients is consistently underestimated and under-treated.

The fountain pen community has been weighing in:

The The Well-Appointed Desk has been regularly posting links to articles and resources related to Black Lives Matter. I am grateful for their persistence in finding and sharing new links every week, links like It’s Nice That with its list of resources for supporting BLM.

Joshua E. Danley (a doctor on those front lines of the COVID-19 epidemic)  veered from his usual focus on Pelikan’s fountain pens to write an eloquent, careful, and passionate statement “to acknowledge the exceptional pain and anger that we see bubbling over in our communities.  Silence is no longer a luxury that any of us can afford.” At the end, he writes that “Each of us must examine our conduct and values in order to ensure that we lift each other up until no one remains shackled by inequality.”

On Medium, there’s Ursula Wolfe-Rocca’s piece on “Teaching for Black Lives in a (Mostly) White Classroom“:

There I found Shannon Ashley’s “20+ Ways White Writers Can Support the Black Community.” Her fourth suggestion is “Read more Black Authors.” A fateful coincidence had one of my friends, younger and wiser than I in so many ways, shortly before George Floyd’s death ignited the protests, recommend to me Jericho Brown’s poetry collection, The Tradition. The title poem, a complexity of gardening and the speaker’s relation to the earth and the danger of living Black (and more that I’m still working out), intersperses lists of the names of flowers with the efforts of Black men to get plants to grow,* and finishes

Men like me and my brothers filmed what we
Planted for proof we existed before
Too late, sped the video to see blossoms
Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems
Where the world ends, everything cut down.
John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.

The list is so much longer now. Say their names:

George Floyd
Rayshard Brooks
Breonna Taylor
Ahmaud Arbery
Sandra Bland
Eric Garner
Trayvon Martin
Tony McDade
Laquan McDonald
Freddie Gray
Aiyana Stanley-Jones (seven years old)
Botham Jean
Michael Jean
Yvette Smith
Alton Sterling

Say the names of the ones I have left out. Stand with the protestors. Be, as Shannon Ashley says, a better human. And urge our lawmakers to declare this day, June Nineteenth, a Federal holiday, so that we have a day to celebrate when a great evil was outlawed and to commemorate how far we still have to go to restore justice and equality to the communities to whom we have denied justice and equality for so long.

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*I am oversimplifying terribly. Read the poem.