Easy
This moment is different. Why did it take so long for us to get here — and what do we have to learn about ourselves?
It was too easy to put our hands up.
We’d lifted them, a little awkwardly, when chanting “hands up, don’t shoot” under the watchful eyes of national guardsmen in green, mirroring a fear for our lives when we didn’t know the first thing about what that actually felt like in your body. We opened our full lungs into the chants, that was the least we could do, that much energy we could give. Now and again, a white stranger would draw in all their anger, and then pierce a chant through the mumbles of the march and direct the echo for a few minutes before letting it settle. Mostly, though, we let the non-white folks heave out our voices, heave out that raw feeling from a few dozen lungs and orchestrate it. “It’s not really my place to lead,” we thought.
Did we ever really care? To care is exhausting, unless you know how it is that you’ve got some skin in the game. We could sign petitions and go to marches; we could try on elegant and aggrieved Facebook posts. We might even email administrators or help draft some demands, but it was falsetto empathy and when we ran out of air it would taper out. We only had so many Saturday afternoons to march; we could only fit so many emails in our to-do lists, pile so many books on our bedside table.
In the summer of 2020, there was a chorus of mostly-Black voices imploring mostly-white people to move our antiracism from head voice to our diaphragms, and in response the falsetto grew louder, more insistent, pleading, but it was scared to look down deep into the lungs that it was called to fill. It dug in its heels deeper. It knew if it looked down, what it would find there was thick shame. We’d find the pain we’d caused, the pain we’d been raised in, that we politely tucked away—the pain of not seeing the full humanity of the Black people in our lives.
We’d find the pain of having been deaf since childhood, somehow, to our Black neighbors screaming at us “I Can’t Breathe.” We’d find the pain of not knowing, as America started to shake: do I check in with Black folks in my life, or not?—because the right answer is only right if you don’t have to ask yourself the question, if it isn’t formulaic, and that requires fully seeing people, and wanting to hold and to love them.
Facing the shame that comes with accountability is scary, but for one person, it isn’t overwhelming. Like stepping into a cool stream of water, when you hold your nose, lift your feet and let yourself finally slip in. So many lined up on the banks, scared of that first step.
It was too easy to put our hands up, because to fight the violence was to fight the very thing that made us. To call out our friends and our parents and our grandparents, to disagree with our teachers, to talk back to our bosses: that was the everyday work, the war of attrition that Black classmates waged every day. When you’ve been given everything you have by playing nice, it’s vertigo-inducing to throw what your whole life has taught you to the wind. Turn away, don’t look, don’t see, I don’t see anything, I’ve taken off my glasses—and each missed action a prick of shame, twisting you deeper into contortions. We put our hands up because the righteousness of white supremacy ran deep, deep in our body, deep in our sense of self, far deeper than we knew how to dig it out. Much easier, then, to turn our attention to the next thing than to linger on it for too long.
In 2020, the world stopped. We came home and didn’t go back out. And as wave after growing wave of Black and brown and poor and elderly bodies heaved and broke across the map of the United States, the world lay on its back. Played dead.
And then, with a shudder, turned back on. But that had been enough: in that split moment, all of the human race felt its deepest feelings. The illusion, sunbleached, weak with time, had grown an enormous rip.
“For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society.”
Underneath the plate glass and aluminum siding, you could see the machinery. And the machinery was human—love and fear, flesh and power. It was nothing out of reach. I became less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.
I became less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.
The dissonance, grating, ugly, between the stories we told ourselves and the stories we knew in our bodies to be true—it was no longer a quiet murmur but an earthquake, the scraping of steel on steel.
The opening grew wider and, though we went through the motions of putting our guards back up, our muscles had no more strength for the contortions. George Floyd, Michael Brown; Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, like arrows to the joints. The numb and pale ghost of four centuries of indignity and murder in our homes, at our hands. Five centuries of global pillage, of walls, of good and “shithole” countries. Of good and bad people.
To let in our deepest feelings was to let go of our fear of confession. Our eyes dared to relax, to look down, they had no choice; and to let the machinery flood into focus, in full, deep, dark color. It was there, pain and beauty in full measure, the white lines of oppression coursing through like tendons, hard to cut out, but no longer invisible. Shame not beyond redemption.
It was clear what was left to do.
Géraud Bablon is a joint-degree student in urban planning and public policy at Harvard University, focusing on place-based strategies that challenge urban marginality and racial injustice in the United States.