It was a weird night. Just eight years prior, we'd elected our first Black president. I was in college at the time surrounded by a crowd of people that looked like me. They had brown skin. They were Pro-Black and proud of the direction the US was moving in. Then for eight years we had to watch that Black president and his beautiful Black wife get disrespected.
As our first Black president's term came to an end the nomination for a new president was narrowed down to two cocky white people. Some people referred to it as choosing between the lesser of two evils. The better choice was the cocky white woman. Her husband had previously been president, so she knew what she would be walking into. The other choice was the kkk member that unfortunately one.
The night he won was the worst night. There was no crowd around me that looked like me. I had to grieve this weirdness alone, but the grieving didn't end on that particular night.
For years chaos ensued. This new president, aka kkk member, was a former reality television star. I hated reality television because it was full of fighting and addictive. I did have an addiction problem that I readily quit. It was easy to quit reality shows. They came on specific channels that could be easily avoided. However, once he became president he brought the reality television to the white house. He wasn't on specific channels either. He found himself on every channel. But he also found his way to the social media sites. All of this was used to take away the previous president's policies, let us know what was going on, and make a lot of racists comments towards Black people.
Oh, but he did have two Black friends, Kanye West and Ben Carson. I'll tell you more about those weirdos later.
I hated what was going on with this president, but there were more important matters to deal with. While Jim Jim Crow, a set of laws that were absolutely meant to make us Black people feel inferior to everyone else, ended in 1964 there were many decades where our people were still being murdered in the streets. Some of those murders that made the news were committed by racists white men who should have been minding their damn business and some were by the cops the claimed to protect us. The murders were bad, but instead of leaving us alone, this new president practically encouraged others to kill us.
It was a mess. We were fighting for our lives. Then in 2020, a pandemic hit the world. Millions of people were laid off from work. Over 100,000 people died for this weird virus no one knew how people were catching and barely know how anyone was healing from it. But the deaths were more horrible not because of all the people dying, but statistics said we were the ones dying at higher proportions. Some people blamed this ratio on our eating habits, but others knew the hospitals weren't trying to treat us. But as the numbers of infected people rose, the world went into quarantine.
Citizens around the world went into their houses and only stepped out to get food. In some areas of the world the numbers of infected people went down, but for other parts it wasn't working. In over crowded cities like NYC and Houston, they numbers of infected and dying people continued to stay high, but at some point sick people stopped mattering. This annoying KKK president declared that states open back up and people move as normally. Some states ignored him, but other states like the one I was living in listened. The state opened wide up, people ran to the beaches, and ran to whatever work they could find.
Some of us were afraid to move as normally, because a pandemic was still happening. However, even during a pandemic, we still managed to make the news because they were still killing us at higher levels. In one new story a man was killed because racists didn't want him jogging through the neighborhood. In another news story a woman was lying peacefully in her bed when the cops busted in and murdered her. The most disturbing part was they'd already arrested the criminal they were looking for. She didn't have to die, but they killed her and never even apologized. What made everyone the angriest was when a Black man walked in a store with a $20 bill, got the police called on him, and ended up suffocating to death because a cop put it knee on the man's neck to hold him down.
What happened next could only be seen as a civil war. We the Black people occupied the streets, took over social media sites broadcasting problems, and silently screamed at the end of every night for an unknown amount of time. We were no longer shedding tears behind closed doors for those that looked like us. We were letting it known that we were angry. We were letting it known that our voices would matter. We would matter. Black lives would matter.
I can't say how long it went on for at the moment, because I'm still living it. But this is the story I'll tell the children when I'm 75.
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