I am sick and tired. Actually, I have reached a point where I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. Over the 4th of July weekend, there was an attempted lynching. If you did not know, the last “recorded” lynching, emphasis on recorded, occurred in Mobile, Alabama; Michael Donald, 19 years old, was the victim. 1981 and 2020, Michael Donald and Vauhxx Booker, the victim of the recent attempt, are all inherently the same. The infamous noose has never left our community; racial bias, inaccessibility, education inequities, and utter hate still choke our airways of freedom, break our necks of dignity, and kill our humanity- a genocide. An over 400-year genocide of mental, emotional, and physical death, they have inflicted upon us; they have attempted to kill and destroy us since the day we took our first breath. However, we are still here.
We are still here through our communal burden to carry our ancestors’ torch. Michael Donald’s last breaths are mine as I, now, call out the issues within my own community. Martin Luther King’s booming voice now resonates within me and my fellow brothers’ spoken words, speeches, and blogs. George Floyd’s broken neck uprights my own to stand defiantly against oppression and bigotry. The death of our activists, brothers, sisters, and parents resemble a blood clot in the human body. With the lack of a vessel, the body’s blood pressure skyrockets as the nutrients in the blood push harder against the clot until it finally bursts, gutting every dependent organ and lively function of the body. America’s colossal clot of racism has created a clot that black blood continues to push against; you have cut off many of the other vessels by infusing drugs in our environments and playing political games, but now, we are at the root, the heart of racism; education is the fatal key, and now acknowledged, we will eviscerate the heart, killing systematic oppression in every facet from the level of food you place in our communities.
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background or his religion. People learn to hate”. Quoted from Martin Luther King Jr., this quote goes beyond the subjects of school to the environment and norms created there. Therefore, in Gwinnett County, where 70.3% of disciplinary incidents resulted in ISS in 2019 and 49.6 % of them being black or when 43% of the recorded detentions in 2019 were black or 64.3% of the recorded expulsions being black, a norm is establishedi; a characteristic norm of troublesome, stupidity, and inadequacy instills itself within blacks and whites- an internal and external hatred. Then, we wonder why race relations are still an issue in America; it’s because they never left. Education is the root of every race issue, and this root has only strengthened its reach into the ground of America.
However, despite its poisonous alienation and fatal treatment, we had, have, and will rise. Let us never forget. Resilience is in our DNATM.ii
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i Governor’s Office of Student Achievement. K-12 Student Discipline Dashboard. Retrieved July 20th, 2020, from https://public.gosa.ga.gov/noauth/extensions/DisciplineDASHV1/DisciplineDASHV1.html
ii The 15 White Coats. Retrieved July 23, 2020, from https://www.the15whitecoats.org