6/7/20 “Reflection” by Bryan Lee

Charlottesville. August 2017. We were there. We witnessed white supremacist groups marching in military unison with military grade weapons. Aimed at invoking fear, they gathered. They snuck up behind us. They threw smoke grenades, cans, and bottles full of urine or concrete at us. They marched in the streets attacking black and brown people who opposed them. Some of them took pictures of us so that we could be terrorized later. They marched with torches at night and surrounded churches full of people. Churches. Then, one of them drove a car through a crowd of us injuring and killing people. Months of trauma therapy still has not released the fear my body holds when I hear the sound of a roaring engine. 

White people called them “good people” and “fine people”. You said they were just expressing themselves and their frustrations. You brushed those atrocities under the rug because the explicit racism that permeates our society is how you really feel below surface of platitudes, thoughts, and prayers. 

Minneapolis, New York, LA, Raleigh, and cities across our country. May and June of 2020. We, non-violently and unarmed, protest the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. We sit outside the capitol building, the city council, the governors mansion, police stations and courthouses, trying to have our voices heard. Those who have suffered for centuries under the boot of systemic racism, holding grief in their bodies that has been passed down from generation to generation, express their grief and burning anger in the streets.

And you call us pathetic. Thugs. Snowflakes. Lazy. And you send the military into our streets to put an end to it because you can’t bear to hear the truth. 

The cognitive dissonance between these stories is, itself, too great a burden to bear. Real people, whose lives have been marked by the pain of systemic racism in this nation, are crying. The fact that it took me almost 25 years of life to hear that is indicative to just how strong and deeply embedded white supremacy is. But, the language you have used to divide, we will use as fire to burn down the barriers to justice and liberation.