Personal Anecdote
BLACK LIVES MATTER
OUR RUBIK’S CUBE OF RACE IN HONOR OF GEORGE FLOYD ON JUNE 2, 2020
By Madi Lommen
I
want to learn the colors and to solve the Rubik’s cube at the same time. That is what it feels like to process the death of George Floyd by a white police officer on the streets where I grew up and all of the events that have unfolded since. My heart wants to cry, my head wants to know how to “fix” it, and my feet want to realize that solution—as if there is a solution to crime against humanity. As if there could ever be a solution that would bring George Floyd back to life.
I did not know George Floyd. I am not mourning his death like his family is. I am mourning how deeply ingrained racism is within the American justice system, still. What does that actually mean? It means that in the South, where confederate flags still cling to the doorsteps of rural homes, a Black person is eleven times more likely to end up on death row than a white person if the victim is white—twenty-two times more likely if the person is Black and the defendant is Black, too (Stevenson, 2012). It means that although Minnesota has the second highest graduation rate of public schools in the United States (Table 228, 2006), it also has a high achievement gap between
white and non-white students.1 It means that I can live my life as a white person without knowing the statistics, but my Black friends cannot. Growing up, I shifted between “white suburbia” and “urban city kid” with relative ease. The loss of my parents’ business and an ugly divorce set my family back financially, but for the first memorable decade of my life, I lived without having to confront, at least in any chronic fashion, unwarranted prejudice. Instead of adding to the racial inequity that my friends of color faced, setbacks created a commonality between me and other kids at
65% of White students in grades four and eight achieved ‘proficiency’ on the reading and math MCAs (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments, the standardized test all public school students take across Minnesota) respectively, while only 31% and 29% of Black, 31% and 25% of Native and 32% and 35% of Hispanic students did, respectively (Grunewald and Nath, 2019). 1
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