Trials and Tribulations during COVID-19
In defining my account of 2020 and the pandemic, I realized that my expectations for my life did not match the actual events of my life in the pandemic. By this I mean I expected to be experiencing the same trials, tribulations, and difficulties as every other American. I prepared for the worst because the swift, yet cynical influx of news from nearly every outlet, including social media, brought feelings of fear and paranoia about my future flooding into every thought. What is going to happen to my career, my social life, my motivation? This fear led to stagnation. In other words, because the world was put on pause, I put my life on pause as well. I stayed in my own bubble, played video games, worked on my college assignments, and watched as the world outside descended into chaos. I was comfortable with this lifestyle until I had a very fateful, untimely call. It was from my friend Xavier. Before anything else, even the words “hey” or “how are you?”, he exclaimed to me that he wanted to do something. ”Do something about what? That butt groove your fat behind has been so carefully sculpted?”, I say back jokingly. “Nah man, be serious. I haven’t done enough for my black folks and I want to change that”, he retorts. These words struck a chord with me because while I’m not black, I felt the exact same way. In this moment, what I felt was not immediate action. It was a shame for my inaction. Without a second thought, I responded to Xavier: “then let’s do something”. Not even knowing how or where to get started, I took another look at myself. I wanted to understand the plight of the black American so that I did not fall prey to the ignorance that hurt us. I wanted to understand why we were experiencing oppression on this level. I wanted to understand our thoughts and emotions. So I spent time learning about things like systemic oppression and racial appropriation and unlearning things like falsehoods regarding black-on-black crime among others. I had conversations I never thought I would have with myfriends like Xavier because our friendship had not reached that level. I found myself not only learning about the issues that plagued us and our people, but also about what I wanted to stand for. That step into understanding was a power unlike one I have never experienced before. My first use of this power was at my town’s first local protest. On a small scale, I was able to experience those who felt the same or similar to me. They were tired of seeing their friends, family, or people that looked like them being oppressed. I saw a small pocket of this oppression firsthand at this protest. The protest took place on a road near an intersection. There were people on both sides of the road and I wanted to protest with some familiar faces on the other side of the road. As I was walking with my Black Lives Matter sign across the street, a white man in a long silver pickup truck stuck the middle finger and yelled profane words at me and those who were walking with me. I’ve never heard the N-word said many times in succession by a non-black person. As I just finished crossing the street, I stood in awe of the way the man would go back and forth with one of my fellow protesters. I could not understand why he was so angry. We were not against him, we were just actively protecting black people. Why couldn’t he understand that? It disgusted me that he thought this way, more than I ever expected it to have. Maybe it was the emotions running high from the energy of the protest ,but I found myself joining in the protesters in shoo-ing the man from our protest. It felt great to be actively anti-racist and it is something that to this day I take pride in. So much so that I participated in the protests in Atlanta as well. This feeling was even more surreal. Yelling and walking left me breathless in an unholy way. I couldn’t feel any more tired from the marches through the streets if I wanted to, but this experience not only brought me closer to understanding my friends, but all my black people as well.
In our goal to keep the momentum of our movement sustained, we created an organization to usher in a new generation of activists- our youth. Social media is our generation’s key tool to keep everyone in the know about issues that still plague our country. Through a growing online presence, we informed current advocates of updates to our cause and effectively created new advocated in the process. We uplifted black innovators and creators with our platform as we are aiming to advance them with our voices. We will introduce ourselves and our cause to supporters during our first online zoom protest, giving our founding members a medium to introduce us to the world and express our issues and emotions. With technology and social media, our goal was to expand our influence so that when we make real moves to ignite change, we have the following to be taken seriously. We worked hard to constantly increase our influence by sharing and making posts that ignite motivation, creating online campaigns to generate support, asking those with influence for their supports, and of course reaching
Social Media influence can only achieve so much in our fight against systemic injustice so we will have to diversify our approach to this ever evolving issue. We wanted to bring our fight to the surface by putting ourselves on the front lines. We are planned protests to bring our issues to attention on the local level; changes must occur on the cellular level if we are to change the way the body works. We felt that our police force must be tested more rigorously than they are now, and more changes need to be made to the way the entire police force operates. Bias training must be instituted. Alternate interaction procedures must be enacted. Harsher penalties need to be instituted for abuse of power. All of these things are simple ways we can improve our police system. Our protests were ways to put pressure on our community leaders to have these changes carried out and also generate attention to our cause. Other campaigns involved fighting through financial means as well. We have even enacted a book club to educate our advocates through black literature, led by people who are of color. We worked tirelessly to create attention towards our cause, eventually working to sit down with our representatives in hopes of creating legislation to create real change, which was one of our ultimate goals.
My most personal and favorite step in the entire process was the podcast that I completed with one of my coworkers and friends, Zach. Being an educated white person, it was important that I obtained his perspective on this entire issue as he spoke for non-POC that were too afraid to ask questions to a person of color. One of the largest issues that we are plagued with in regards to the conversation about racism is misinformation and miscommunication. While educating ourselves, we brought along guests and gained multiple insightful perspectives on issues that black people faced in America .This whole situation taught me the importance of group education because it increases motivation towards a cause. It is also powerful when other people share your same sentiment about an issue.
These experiences allowed us to understand that if there weren’t a problem with the way that our country was being run then this many people would not have showed up for this cause. This was just the beginning for racial justice in this country. I was thankful for what the movement gave to me and I was looking forward to what I could give back to the movement.