“The Nail in the Coffin”
How broken systems and racism during COVID have resulted in our violently loud, collective harmony.
When the world shutdown due to COVID-19 in March 2020, there was a collective feeling of fear.
Fear for our health and well-being as people got sick and those who were already sick lost medical attention and became re-prioritized. Fear of our financial stability as we witnessed what we thought were unsinkable industries and commerce collapse overnight. Fear of the unknown as questionable information was — and continues to be — provided to us only to have it change by the day, hour, minute. Fear of letting go of the foreseeable future, while mourning the loss of a normal we thought we once knew.
As a whole, we’re stepping into a new world that hasn’t been engineered for us yet. There is no solid point of reference and the landscape is evolving rapidly. Food delivery services are considered as essential as medical workers and our children are being taught through digital classrooms. During this time, specifically in the U.S., systemic problems we always knew existed are now apparent and certain. The obvious faults in our healthcare system and lack of support for unemployment are not only unavoidable but en mass. With the US reaching a staggering unemployment rate of 14% in less than 3 months, our government has scrambled to fit band-aids on severed limbs as small businesses and large corporations file for bankruptcy.
While we’ve identified this new disease as a natural common enemy, we still remain fiercely divided and politicized. Deciding to wear a mask or not and getting a haircut is as quietly bombastic as sporting a MAGA hat. And with our achilles heel exposed in ways that are undeniable due to COVID, we are also incredibly aware of more known flaws in our system, namely racial injustices.
While racism and the traumatic generational effects it has in Black communities in America should be something that we can state as a fact, it remains to either be ignored or questioned as if it’s something to be chosen as a belief system instead of an observable reality, similarly to COVID.
With the recognized and continued violence on Black communities, COVID feels like an added jab in the side. While death takes space in our emotional and mental real estate this year as all of us have been ushered inside, any and all civic issues that air become overwhelmingly noticeable. Like a raucous domestic dispute taken publicly in a neighborhood at night. What happens in the streets are now spotlit as we have all been forced to take witness from 6 feet away, through our windows, or behind our screens. This is nothing new.
“Racism is not getting worse, it’s getting filmed.“*
Social media has become the biggest ally to the Black community by exposing violent and racist acts. From the historic LA riots in ’92 and evolving with technology and the internet, people of color have been equipped with what feels like our only weapon: our phones. Even with indisputable footage caught on video, the outcome for most of these hate-induced events only continues to show that the law was never interested in holding certain groups accountable. Because, like several of our other institutions, our justice system was not built to protect those of us with black and brown skin. These systems were created without justice and equitability in mind and their architects have no interest in a redesign. Movements have put pressure on these structures hoping for change. Both have bowed over time, but with the outbreak of a pandemic everyone and everything has been violently thrown into a tailspin and we may finally be at a breaking point.
With COVID, the collective trauma that generations of us have been burdened now bears the weight of an additional load. Those who have had the privilege to avoid this are now experiencing inescapable trauma at a mass scale for the first time. Regardless of our dividing beliefs, we can all agree that we’re drained. Yet, despite our exhaustion, we continue to see videos of a repetitive narrative we know all too well.
The videos that we’ve seen time and time again show Black men and women being murdered. Or being questioned, harassed, and threatened for; birdwatching, working out, waiting for AAA, being 8 years old, going home, and existing in general, for reasons we can only recognize as fear. However, the videos within the last month have somehow hit differently.
Recently a coworker asked me how I’ve been sleeping.
“Not well,” I said. “The birds have been keeping me up all morning and acting weird. They perch on my windowsill and watch me.”
“Oh,” he said. “Is this something new, or, have they always done this and you’re just now taking notice?”
Since COVID, Philly’s omnipresent noise pollution has drastically subsided and become eerily quiet due to shelter in place. The dive bar on my corner that people typically pour out of at 2 am has been boarded up indefinitely. Traffic has died down and with it, booming music from speaker sets. And pedestrians walk in silence with covered mouths. On the rare occasion that I do hear people out at night, I take notice. It’s almost shocking and foreign now. The birds in the morning, people out at night, noises I once used to drown out are almost deafening.
Are all of the recent videos released exceptionally loud?
Exceptionally deafening and painful?
Exceptionally gut-wrenching?
One incident is not more important or demanding of our action than the other, and we will always grieve over a loss at the hands of a violent act, but it feels like a boot on our chest at a time when we have already collapsed from exhaustion. But our response seems different this time.
It feels like it’s being handled with more haste. Beyond our retweets, memes, and curated instagram stories, it feels like useful information was shared faster than our fingers could type.
Unanticipated allies have come to speak out after years of hiding behind a false abili. At a time where we’ve been instructed to stay inside, people have chosen to put their lives on the line in more ways than one as we burn it all down. Enough has been enough for some time, and the volume of our voices have never stopped crying out like birds on a windowsill. It’s not that we’ve stopped talking or listening, it’s that we’re all finally shouting together.
As these murders, assaults, and harassments are digitally captured and shared across social media, it continues to shed light on what we already knew and know to be true. It’s a forceful reminder of our mutually shared truth. That same force is the force that is heralding us through this reality and into the “new normal”.
Don’t lose the momentum.
Perhaps we need to let these systems and institutions spin wildly out of control. They have only benefited select groups for so long, without ever conceiving it would need to scale and open to a vast majority that had been excluded. Perhaps there’s a potential for a new normal to be re-written and birthed out of necessity from the chaos. One in which in order to fix shit we first need to break shit.
