It is a reality that parents of children of color have to teach their kids about. It cannot be surprising that injustice has bubbled over into violence.įear of being unjustly accused, unjustly detained, unjustly arrested, unjustly brutalized, and unjustly killed is a reality that African Americans and other people of color have to live with every moment of every day. And I know the ways that when people have protested nonviolently for an acknowledgment that black lives do in fact matter in this country, they have been systematically villainized, characterized as unAmerican, been fired from their jobs. All of these deaths with hardly any justice, virtually no consequences for those responsible. And while I don’t condone violence, I recognize the tremendous frustration that apparently leads some to it. Even in Portland there has been vandalism and violence. And in some cases, those mostly peaceful protests have escalated into violence. In a time when anxiety is already heightened, most of us are already on edge, and people of color are disproportionately dying from coronavirus, protests have been staged across the country. Their actions have been nearly universally condemned, including by the National Association of Police Organizations and the Fraternal Order of Police. In response, four officers involved in the incident have been fired, and Chauvin has been charged with 3rd degree murder. George Floyd was declared dead in the emergency room an hour after he apparently lost consciousness. Fire Department reports say that medics in the ambulance were working on Floyd, who was unresponsive and pulseless. He only gets off of Floyd after an ambulance arrives. Floyd is unresponsive and apparently unconscious as bystanders plead with police to get off of Floyd’s neck and to check for a pulse, but Officer Chauvin continues to kneel on his neck, pressing his face into the ground for another 5 minutes, while Floyd lays completely motionless. Two minutes later, police call for an ambulance, but Officer Derek Chauvin continues to press his knee on Floyd’s neck for another 6 minutes. Floyd can be heard begging, “Please, please, please, I can’t breathe,” in a haunting echo of the words of Eric Garner almost 6 years ago. Floyd for nearly nine minutes while he is handcuffed and pinned face-down to the ground. Footage shows a Minneapolis PD officer kneeling on the neck of Mr. George Floyd was arrested in Minneapolis for allegedly using a counterfeit twenty dollar bill to pay at a local convenience store. Eric Garner, Ezell Ford, Michelle Cusseaux, Tanisha Anderson, Tamir Rice, Natasha McKenna, Walter Scott, Bettie Jones, Philando Castile, Botham Jean, Tatiana Jefferson, Eric Reason, Dominique Clayton, Breona Taylor, among many others. There is even a new outbreak of the disease in Hood River County.īut now the nation is also reeling in the wake of the death of yet another unarmed black person at the hands of police. There is, of course, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 100,000 people in the US, made 40 million unemployed, and kept all of us sheltering in place, unable to live life as we have known it, unable to make even the simplest of human connections. There’s a lot going on in the world right now.
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