American Pandemic
The day the LAPD prevents cars from driving south on the 101 is the first night we sit in my apartment and listen to the sound of helicopters overhead. We watch the news and wonder which are the ones that belong to the police and which belong to the media focusing only on the damage they want to highlight when roads are blocked, curfews are set and voices are silenced.
For the past few months, we have lived in an isolated world where the only topic of conversation has been a virus. Some imagined it was something brought here on purpose. When we didn’t take it seriously, we saw the consequences of that ignorance. We saw death rates go up, we saw hospitals run out of ventilators, we said goodbye to loved ones over the phone. We were told to stay indoors, to not gather in big groups. We obeyed and made the changes in our lives, but when we heard their names out in the streets, there came a time to acknowledge something else equally evident and very much alive in our society.
On the last day of May, we walk around in a version of Downtown Los Angeles I’ve never recognized where humvees line the street. City Hall is now protected by barriers, the LAPD and the National Guard who remain silent as we chant I can’t breathe and Black Lives Matter. We say their names, all of them, over and over while cars honk incessantly letting us know they, too, stand with us. We ask Officer Martinez if he thinks the system truly cares about him. Our voices continue to spread and when the curfew hits, we don’t go home. We each take a knee and ignore the sirens that grow louder as we commit the phone number of the Los Angeles Lawyers Guild to memory.
It took our cities being shut down to take Covid 19 seriously. It came out of nowhere, people have said. One night we were out at bars, the next night those bars were shut down. Then after time of solitude, our social media timelines begin to go back to brunches and outfits of the day and the next another innocent black man was telling us he couldn’t breathe, trying to wake us up. We may have lived in an isolated world the last few months, but how many of us have lived in an isolated world throughout our lives with the privilege to ignore reality?
When people ask if there are riots near me, I wonder why they are not instead asking what the protests are like? During quarantine, people objected to barber shops being closed, having to homeschool their kids, before they considered how many would die from this virus. They chose to speak out about looting before they considered that police brutality has caused people of color to live in fear the next time they go jogging. They chose to say things like all lives matter and looked away from the racism that has always been rooted in American soil. In the days following George Floyd’s death, the Catholic, all-girls high school I attended posted its own statement in support. This school’s student body is mostly white; its faculty contains few people of color. While they might have meant well, they described racism as, “not only a black issue, but a hispanic issue, an immigrant issue, an American issue.” As I read through the statement, I waited for them to say, “All lives matter,” because they had clearly chosen to let their students of color know they would not say, “Black lives matter.” I wonder why it is hard for some to use those three words. Why all has to replace black. Why one would insist that black and all are separate ideas, when black being separated from all is the way America is and the problem we need to fix.
I look at photos side by side of protests today and during the Civil Rights Movement and try and seek out the differences aside from the face masks we now wear. They protested racial segregation, demanded the equal rights that so many have blindly thought ended racism and decades later we are still out here, still fighting for unfiltered equality, demanding justice for people who should still be alive. We’re fighting a system that issues no-knock warrants and kills a woman asleep in her apartment. A system that kills men for selling loosies. A system that kills boys walking home in a neighborhood that has been deemed out of their reach.
People remain silent in the same way they defy social distancing orders. They pretend it isn’t real, they pretend it won’t affect them, they pretend their stance doesn’t matter and choose to not stand with the rest. They tell you not all cops are bad cops, they tell you blue lives matter while they make excuses for police brutality. In 2015 when Eric Garner said he couldn’t breathe, a debate went round on the differences between a chokehold and a headlock. A chokehold meant there was some form of pressure put on someone’s windpipe, making it unable for them to breathe. Some passionately explained that Eric Garner was put in a headlock; had it been a chokehold, he would not have been able to state that he couldn’t breathe. I wonder now if those headlock enthusiasts heard George Floyd say he couldn’t breathe. Would they argue it wasn’t a chokehold Derek Chauvin put him in, it was his knee that he kept on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Will they argue it was 7 minutes and 46 seconds? This virus, racism, it is all real when you can’t acknowledge that people are being murdered.
Before we found ourselves in quarantine, we chose to ignore the information the CDC provided. We ignored the reports from China and Italy, but there came a time that our country had to wake up and act. Our stay-at-home orders were put in place and even today things aren’t fixed. A second wave is predicted. While some live their lives and ignore the revolution that is outside their windows, others have been out on the front lines speaking for the voiceless since before George Floyd called out for his mother. Some people my age, older, or younger have just decided to tune in and acknowledge the problems our country has had for longer than they taught us in school. I wish I could say it wasn’t until college that I learned there was more to black history that took place between Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King Jr. In the Fall of 2016 I took a class with Dr. Clarence B. Jones, a man who worked as Dr. King’s political adviser, draft speech writer and counsel. On the first day of class, he told us we could never understand how America got to be the way it was today if we didn’t study the history, politics and racial conflicts of our country from slavery to Obama. During the first class we had with Dr. Jones after the 2016 election, we all sat around like a bunch of depressed liberals and asked Dr. Jones how this had happened and what we were supposed to do now. I remember the way he asked us if we had been listening to what he had been saying all along; had we truly examined everything between slavery and Obama. We were in a class being taught the truth about racism and here we were saying goodbye to Obama and welcoming a man who would soon have no problem tear gassing protestors so he could hold up a Bible in front of a church.
At the end of the day, it’s not too late to wake up and fight for what our world has never been. It’s about choosing to educate yourself and opening your mind to truths that contradict what you have thought as true for so long. But you must choose to do that. You read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. You watch 13th, you watch Eyes on the Prize or any of the films that Netflix has now put in a whole category for you. You recognize and support black-owned businesses and restaurants. You separate the protests from the riots, you sign those petitions, you make those phone calls, you have those uncomfortable conversations with others who refuse to listen.
When stores, restaurants and bars open up again, people will eventually forget. They will act like this virus is a thing of the past when a vaccine is created, the ways they acted like racism was a thing of the past when Obama was elected. Maybe one day our grandchildren will face a virus just as bad and they'll learn about Covid 19 the way we learned the name Emmett Till, when we learned the names Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Maybe by the time I finish this essay I’ll run out of ways to compare Covid 19 and racism and we’ll realize which one is the true American pandemic.
When you hear their names being chanted outside your window, you go outside. You walk with the people because this is the future. In a moment back at City Hall on the last day of May, a man in front of me stops chanting I can’t breathe and begins a chant of his own. He says,
“I can breathe. I will breathe. For my children. My grandchildren. We will not die.”
Victoria Crowe is a writer and editor of You Might Need To Hear This. Originally from Queens, NY, she studied creative writing in San Francisco and has since moved to Los Angeles. She writes both fiction and nonfiction and finds her poetry is usually decent after a bottle of wine. Her work has been published in Harness Magazine, Herstry Blog, and District Lit. She is currently finishing up her second novel and afterwards plans to start her first.
