July 2020: Where We Live Now
On Saturday we moved to an apartment in Beacon, NY. It’s a 3 bedroom apartment in an old house with an upstairs and downstairs. My favorite place in the whole apartment is the top of the staircase where I can sit by the window and look out at the mountains. Typing that last sentence makes me dizzy with the velocity of change. This summer marked 19 years for me in New York City. It was pouring rain when I closed the door to our apartment for the last time, ran down the front stoop and paused for just a second to stare up at the brownstone on Hart Street where we had made a home for six years. I had only a second before running to hop in the driver’s side of the car that I would drive up behind the Uhaul. Taking it all in would’ve been overwhelming. I started the car, took off my mask, wiped the sweat from my face with the hem of my t-shirt. It was not the goodbye I had anticipated after nearly two decades somewhere; it was not the exit I could’ve predicted. But this is where we live now.
For the last 110 days, the men who killed Ms. Breonna Taylor in Louisville, KY - Brett Hankinson, Jon Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove - have not been arrested for her murder. In reading about prison abolition and the abolition of the police, arresting these officers may not be the path towards systemic change, but it would be a start towards justice for Ms. Breonna Taylor. I think a lot about how she had pledged that 2020 would be her year - she wanted to buy a house and start a family. She worked tirelessly as an EMT during a global pandemic - remember not too long ago when we clapped at 7pm everyday for the essential workers? - and was shot by accident when police entered her home without a warrant. They didn’t even knock. They were in the wrong house. This is where we live now, but it’s where Black Americans have lived for hundreds of years - in a racist country where a Black woman can be murdered in her sleep and for one hundred and ten days, no one is held accountable.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the long game and about what sustainable antiracism work can look like. It’s reading books and donating to Black community organizations and taking to the streets, but it’s also a commitment to the roots-deep work needed for real change. I’ve been here before - after the Ferguson uprising in 2014; after the 2016 election; after the murder of Philando Castile - signing petitions, going to SURJ meetings, committing to change. But then I slip back into the world as I knew it, as I know it currently, thinking that it is enough to believe in justice rather than work towards justice. The thesis of Dr. Ibram X Kendi’s book How To Be An Antiracist is that you can’t only be not racist; one has to be antiracist. This is where I want to live, in the active verb of antiracist work.
In April, Arundhati Roy published an essay about how a pandemic is a portal: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew,” she writes. “This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” I take this is as optimism at a time when we need something to look forward to. What do you want the new world to look like? No prisons, no police. No more murders of Black people in America. The opportunity to create this world is right here, where we live now.
Keep loving, keep fighting.
xo,
c