Return to Normal? No, Let's Not.

Across the country, governors and corporate leaders are hoping and pushing for a return to some semblance of normalcy, since COVID-19 disrupted all our lives and sent our economy spiraling. But is a return to ‘normalcy’ really what is needed at this time? I think part of the reason that myself and so many others are heading out to the streets, night after night – even knowing the risk of the pandemic – is that these months of ‘social distancing’ and ‘stay-at-home’ orders have gotten us all thinking about what’s really important. And what we’ve come to realize is that going back to what was ‘normal’ means accepting a society in which black men are shot dead, choked to death and brutalized by police on a regular basis. And we can no longer accept that.

We can no longer accept a society that sweeps under the rug the hypocrisy and cruelty of our nation’s founders, that denies the genocide of Native Americans that paved the way for the enslavement of Africans that built the wealth of the society we have today. We can no longer accept the ongoing theft of wealth from the black community, the wrenching apart of families, the imprisonment of so many black men. And for those of us who have been standing up for decades against injustices large and small, this feels like a moment of reckoning. There have been waves of protest that have overtaken this nation through the last two decades – challenging U.S. imperialism abroad, standing up to corporate trade deals and institutions, occupying parks and public spaces to demand that the wealthiest one percent stop hoarding the nation’s economic assets, taking back Native land for Native people at Standing Rock to try to stop a pipeline, and protesting police and white racists killing black people – again, and again and again.

But the waves keep returning, and now, in the midst of a pandemic that has disrupted all our plans, the wave has become a tidal wave, with a relentless fury that shows no signs of stopping. As a middle-aged white woman who has benefited from white privilege (despite economic disadvantage – and if you don’t know the difference, look it up), I want that relentless fury to continue. I listen to the young people who take the megaphone each night and pour out their hearts, sharing stories of despicable racism they have personally endured. I hear the fear and the courage and the determination in their voices, and I know that we, as a society, have let them down. We have allowed ourselves to reach this interminable impasse in which our young people don’t even know if they will have a livable planet in forty years due to our short-sighted, profit-focused market structures – and if they are Black or brown, don’t know if they’ll even live long enough to see the impacts of climate change. Those kids know that if they encounter police or white racist civilians, they could lose their lives at any moment, for any reason at all. And the laws and the structures in place are not there to protect them, but to protect white supremacy in all its manifestations.

So don’t wonder why these thousands of people are putting their lives on the line each day and night across this country to challenge the white supremacist basis of our system of policing, imprisonment and governance. Because ‘returning back to normal’ (leaving aside the fact that the re-opening is being done without a coordinated national plan to address the pandemic) means returning to a way of life that, for many, is intolerable and not at all ‘normal’. We can’t let this moment pass by simply going back to that so-called normal state in which Black lives don’t matter and some people are more equal than others. We must seize this moment and dig deep inside ourselves and our society as a whole, and address this historic and ongoing plague of white supremacy. As the youth of color who are leading the protests keep reminding us: for some people, it is not a choice. It is a matter of life or death. And we, as a society, must stop choosing domination, subjugation and death. It is time that we take a cue from the most oppressed people on Earth, the Palestinian people in Gaza, who launched their weekly March of Return movement two years ago with the slogan, “We choose life, sir”. We, too, can choose life instead of accepting the brutality of a police force borne out of slavery that continues to serve as the enforcement arm of a white supremacist system. And we cannot, must not stop until Black lives truly do matter as much as white lives do in our society. Because right now, they do not.