These days I find myself lying awake later and later because my brain is racing and my heart is sinking and the bad news on my social media feeds makes me want to cry. No, worse than that, my heart is becoming used to the bad news, used to the pain everywhere, and I want to cry because all this hurt and anger is becoming the normal for me, for all of us. There is a strong sense of united pain, and yet--
And yet it still feels sometimes -- a lot of the time -- like things are going nowhere. Innocents still die, those that should be held accountable are not, justice and peace seem like odd, foreign concepts. There are people that I've heard say that at every point in history bad things have happened, that no generation is free of pain. But surely, surely by now we would have learned to not continue wreaking the same pain upon the same people. But no, we still do, just under a guise of unity which only makes it that much worse. It means that we are ignoring the ugliest parts of our history instead of ensuring that those parts are never again replayed.
People will claim -- in an attempt to display their willingness to accept everyone -- that they are colorblind, but what good does that do? The color of an individual's skin defines the trajectory of their lives, defines the opportunities they are presented, defines the way society treats them, defines their culture, their identity, their struggles. We must recognize a person's color and reach out to embrace that person not despite the color of their skin, but because of it. That is what will prove that we as a society have learned from our history and are taking steps to correct our wrongs. If we are all supposedly the same now, all of us judging each other on merit and actions and not on color, then why do people of color continue to die unjustly, unprovoked?
If we are truly united at this moment, why is there so much fear? Why when the news is turned on is there such a clear line between a "them" and an "us?" We have supposedly progressed as a people; we've changed, we've grown, we've righted wrongs. So then why, why when I open my news feed do I see black body after black body listed day after day, week after week, month after month as if their deaths are as constant and expected as the sun rising in the sky? Here and everywhere people of color are dying and it's gotten to a point where I'm informed, "This many refugees drowned trying to get somewhere safe," "This many people were taken hostage in Bangladesh," "Medina was the site of a suicide bombing," "In Baton Rouge..." "Philando Castile..." and my first reaction is a nod because I've long since stopped being surprised.
For this much death, this much struggle, this much pain to be normalized is nothing short of disgusting. And the tragedy is that none of this is new; it is simply, finally, being exposed. The question then becomes, when will this tragedy end, and at what cost?
