by Jon Wizard
We will never achieve a more fair, just, and equitable society unless you’re willing to become a co-conspirator and
Put Something on the Line For Black people, the very public murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis was the most recent reminder of a long legacy of racism in the United States. But today, that word seems so inadequate, almost quaint. When people who look like us — who look like our mothers and fathers, our aunties and uncles, our neighbors and friends, and, most devastatingly, our children — are slowly suffocated to death in the gutter in broad daylight, or shot to death in their beds while they sleep, or shot to death for wearing a hoodie, or shot to death for jogging, shot in the front for jaywalking or in the back for running away, it’s more than just racism. It’s hate. It’s a deepseated, visceral hatred of our very existence and the undeniably intentional desire to erase us.
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Four hundred years ago, my ancestors were kidnapped from their homes and violently ripped from their families, stuffed into the hold of a boat, and shackled together as they were forced across the Atlantic to the Americas. For more than 150 years, they toiled away in the scorching heat and crushing humidity building this country’s wealth and might, only to be excluded from that hollow document declaring all men equal. Another 89 years would pass before the war was over, and the government said we were finally free. But freedom did not last, and just 12 short years later, elected Black legislators were dragged from statehouses, the Ku Klux Klan had risen to power, and many so-called white allies had abandoned us. The nine decades following the
Compromise of 1877, which marked the end of Reconstruction, would become known as the Jim Crow era. For the heinous and amoral crimes of looking at a white person (known as reckless eyeballing), whistling, looking for work, walking to work, walking home from work, walking on the sidewalk while white people walked there, sitting toward the front of a bus, using a water fountain, using a public restroom, using a public pool, or pretty much anything else you might think of, Black people were beaten and incarcerated to remind them of their place as somewhere between property and second-class citizens. This apartheid state was the product of the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the parMONTEREY BAY PARENT • july 2020
