It’s been seven years since the “Black Lives Matter” movement started, and nothing has changed in this country but everything is different.
“You’re freezing me out,” says my spouse Janyce. It’s Saturday morning and the Google alarm is sounding a loud wake-up chime over and over. On my side table, the sunlamp has also gradually reached full strength and the recorded birds are chirping away.
“It’s cold in here, you’re right,” I say. “I turned the air down last night.”
“What did you turn it to?” she says.
“I don’t know, I couldn’t see. I was just hitting the button in the dark.” I say.
Janyce gets up and exits the bedroom with the dog in tow while I pull on a sweatshirt and open the blinds to the morning sun dappling a canopy of green outside the window.
“Creature movement is high today,” she calls to me from the other room reading from her smart phone app. I’ve climbed back in bed with my computer and I’m sitting up looking out the window, watching a blue jay pair with their striking black and blue plumage swoop back and forth policing the yard.
Today is the first day of summer and we have plans to drive out to the country later to sit in social distance with friends in their expansive backyard. If we’re lucky, we might see a black bear amble out of the protected forest at the edge of their property while we talk around the new outdoor fireplace, seeing each other for the first time since January.
Yesterday, I sat in the shade under the tree while my youngest son who lives in Nashville called me from the road. “Do you want me to drive straight to get a Covid test?” he said. “Yeah, I think that would be best.” I said. “You made great time. We all can’t wait to see you.”
Last night, in honor of Juneteenth, Janyce and I stayed up late to watch the 2016 Netflix documentary 13th, sitting in silence together in the dark on the couch with rapt attention.
It’s not as if we never heard the words “mass incarceration,” and didn’t understand the lyrics to the songs by the hip hop group Public Enemy. It’s not as if we didn’t know something about the awful anti-black events in the shameful history of our country, but more that we never took the time to actively educate ourselves until now.
The mark of a great documentary is the ability to get you to feel things. 13th lays the whole sequence of events in history from slavery, to Jim Crow, to mass incarceration, to today’s American gun culture and police brutality out in a line, one decade after another, with each year informing the other, building a case that so thoroughly debunks the mythology of inherent black criminality, a mythology that our country has managed to reinvent over and over again. We watched the full 100 minutes in silent horror.
It’s been seven years since the “Black Lives Matter” movement started, and nothing has changed in this country but everything is different.
I’m grappling daily with how much to resume my life and start spending time with my family and friends while the virus shows little signs of abating in places. Still others are out protesting and taking chances in the urgent need for speaking out. Today also marks the occasion of the first Trump rally since the country closed down.
And November is only five months away.