I'm Due To Give Birth Today But All I Can Think About Is George Floyd
Huff PostA photo of the author. I remember telling my father that I had accepted a post-graduate fellowship in New Orleans, and his fearful reply: “But people are racist down there!” At 22, I laughed at my Black immigrant father’s willingness to buy into the Minnesotan narrative; despite his two decades of personal experience with discrimination ― in work, in housing, in banking, in the criminal justice system ― my father had been taught that the “real racism,” the kind to be feared, was “down South.” As a soon-to-be parent of two, I can empathize with that desire to believe now; I see that in order to have the strength to raise our children in this world, we need to believe there is hope where we are and that our children will somehow benefit from it. I think of how, before his Black body would even be cold, the world would rather hear of his arrest record than to know he is a father and grandfather, that he is bilingual, or that, when we were little, he would rally all the kids at the playground into one big game of “monster tag” that we would play past dusk, until the mosquitos stuck to the sweat on our skin. “I was quickly reminded that as Black folks, our untimely deaths are already explained for us.” I’ve had the opportunity of late to worry about things a bit more universal, like a global pandemic. Behind clichés like “good hair” are a bitter truth; the roll of the genetic die that determines how “Black” you look also determines how the world will see you.
History of this topic
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