When the destruction started, I was honestly scared. I drove through La Mesa, a city I had previously lived in, because I needed to see the damage with my own eyes. My anxiety rose as I went past each burnt down building, police barricade and boarded-up storefront. “How are we possibly going to survive race riots during a pandemic?” I wondered. It felt like our country was falling apart at the seams, and there was no clear way to stop it from happening. For the next two days, I could barely get out of bed.
When we tell the story of 2020, how are we going to describe it? For me, the year started on an optimistic note. My career had momentum and I had a plan in place to increase that momentum. I had been living between Mexico and San Diego for a few years and was finally starting to feel comfortable with my living situation and busy social life on both sides of the border. It’s as if the coronavirus snatched the planet out of orbit, shook it hard, and put it back down on an off-kilter axis.
I thought the COVID-19 pandemic was the most dramatic world event of my life when suddenly another disaster jumped to the forefront of our collective attention. Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, and a Black man was mercilessly killed in front of our eyes. Those excruciating 8 minutes and 46 seconds were a brutal reminder of another, more insidious pandemic: racism. In the United States, it’s our pre-existing condition. It seems to be built into our DNA.
I don’t racism from my childhood. Vermont, my home state, was over 98% White during my 18 years there. “Whitest state in the Union!” I would say later in life. Most people of color that I saw were pop culture icons like Eddie Murphy and Will Smith. Those were positive and entertaining icons that made a lasting impression on me. I was 16 years old before I visited a city outside of Vermont and caught a glimpse of the diversity that awaited me.
My excellent grades and lower-class status were appealing to a school like Boston College, a private Catholic, Jesuit school that was a bastion of wealthy White privilege. Despite first impressions, Boston College turned out to be an incredibly progressive school. The professors opened my eyes to the inequalities that exist in the world. It was “Deviance and Social Control” that inspired me to switch my major from Spanish to Sociology. It was “Intro to Feminism” that put a name and a history to something I had felt since I was a young girl. It was “Black Women in Feminism” that gave me an understanding of the multiple layers of discrimination they face. Unique classes and revolutionary teachers pushed my thoughts to places I didn’t even know existed. They asked me not only to critically analyze history but to take action to change the future. By the time those four years ended, I was firmly on a path of social justice, human rights and service to my community.
For years after that, I considered myself an activist. I went to rallies and protests and wanted so badly for things to improve. At the time, in the early 2000s, it began to feel like a futile effort. It was exhausting and infuriating to work so hard and then see the culture around us change so imperceptibly. Ultimately I decided to redirect my activist energy and instead focus on the community around me. I began to work with homeless teens and at-risk youth in an effort to focus my social change hyper-locally. I began to teach and to work with students to create social justice documentaries about immigration, homelessness, refugees, tenants’ rights and LGBTQ+ issues.
So when I saw the destruction, I was scared. I could barely get out of bed for days. But then it gave way to massive worldwide peaceful protests and subsequent reform. Over the years, I’ve seen waves of reform rise and quickly fall with the distractions of the news cycle and our busy lives. This time, however, it feels very different. Once the dust and the smoke settled, I saw something I didn’t think I’d see in my lifetime; people in power were listening to the voices of those who have been ignored for far too long. Perhaps the pandemic shook some sense into all of us. Maybe it was the extended self-reflection and isolation that woke us out of our complacency.
George Floyd didn’t mean to be a catalyst, but his cries for mercy were unmistakable. They were cries that rightfully ignited people to action. We can’t bring George Floyd back, but we can do our best to make sure the rotten roots of racism in our country, and our world, are dug up and burned. I believe we’re going to look back on this time as our own civil rights movement, similar to that of the 1960s. First, with transgender rights, then with #MeToo, and now Black Lives Matters, these will be transformative movements in the chapters of future history books. Hopefully, we’ll see these years as the time we tore down some of the last strongholds of systemic oppression.
If that’s how we this year, then maybe 2020 won’t be so bad after all!
