A Change Has Gotta Come
I remember watching the Rodney King beating on the ABC World News Tonight in 1991. I was a child. My grandma was in the kitchen making…
I remember watching the Rodney King beating on the ABC World News Tonight in 1991. I was a child. My grandma was in the kitchen making dinner and my grandfather was watching Peter Jennings on the TV. The video came on and we watched grainy footage of a man on the ground being beaten (with what I thought were sticks) by many men. He tried to shield himself and failed as they kept hitting and hitting him.
I wondered why they kept going because he was already on the ground and clearly was not armed. Turning to my grandfather, I asked why those men were doing that. If he’s already on the ground and can’t hurt them, why keep hitting him? If they were police officers, couldn’t they just arrest him and take him away to jail? My grandpa said he didn’t know.
Then we ate dinner.
I wish I could say that experience led to some sort of awaking in me, but I was six. I never forgot about that video, but I didn’t dwell on it throughout my childhood. It wasn’t until George Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012 and watching video of Eric Garner being suffocated by police officers in New York in 2014 that I finally began to understand how broken the system was. Garner pleaded with them to stop. He told them he couldn’t breathe. Then he died.
How privileged I was to go more than two decades without realizing how profoundly systemic racism affects people of color in this country. As I watched that video the bubble of my privilege began to dissolve, and I thought about what it would be like to be choked to death for selling a loose cigarette on a street corner. There was no judge, no jury, no due process of law. This wasn’t right and something had to be done.
Less than a month after Garner’s death nine-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by a police officer in Cleveland. Nothing changed. Then came Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland in 2015. Nothing changed. Then Alton Sterling in 2016 and nothing changed. Fast forward to February of this year and we watched Ahmaud Arbery get killed while out for a jog. In March, Louisville police shot Breonna Taylor eight times as she was sleeping in her bed. Now we come to George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin — an officer who had more than 17 complaints filed about his conduct during his time on the force.
When will the change come? When will police officers be held accountable? When will we have true systemic reform? Will it ever come?
These are the questions I ask myself now when I see a new video of police officers hurting and killing unarmed black people. I am not convinced anything will change and that thought fills me with despair. So when I see hundreds of protesters peacefully assembling on the streets of Wenatchee to protest this injustice, I applaud them.
I applaud these mostly young people who, like me, have grown up witnessing what seems like an unending parade of unchecked police brutality toward people of color. I applaud them for taking a stand. I applaud them for sticking to their pledge of non-violence, especially in the face of craven agitators and wannabe vigilantes who bring guns to peaceful demonstrations.
When I see thousands of people gathering peacefully against systemic racism right in Wenatchee, Leavenworth and Chelan I see the future – and it gives hope.
While protesting during a pandemic might not be the best idea in terms of public health, these are not the first protests we’ve seen since the COVID-19 pandemic started. Although much smaller in number, we’ve seen folks protesting for fishing and hunting rights and even protests about haircuts.
Yet I didn’t see any aggressive or violent behavior toward those protestors.
So I hope that whatever group of protesters you support or stand in solidarity with, you will never condone or incite violence toward or by those participating in their First Amendment rights.
However you feel about protests and protestors, the fact remains that staring us in the face is the undeniable truth that systemic racism is real and has a pervasive and insidious impact on people of color and our entire society. Police brutality is just one way it rears its ugly head and it must be dealt with comprehensively as well as promptly because when justice isn’t actually for all it undermines the entire concept of justice itself. And without justice, there can be no peace.
I wrote this as an op-ed piece for the Wenatchee World after the protest on Sunday, May 31, 2020. After the events that transpired on Saturday, June 6 in Wenatchee I wrote a new op-ed and resubmitted it. But I wanted publish this original piece in some format.
During the protests on Sunday, June 31 I gathered and tweeted some footage of the peaceful protesting in Wenatchee and it got picked up by CBS News and used in this piece: https://youtu.be/oVxDCmLUktc