Don't Complain
I remember being at work one afternoon in late April 1992. I was setting up the bar in a slow Brookline restaurant and the news was showing images from South Central LA. The Rodney King verdict had just been announced. Orange flames, blue police lights and black fists filled the screen hanging over the bar. Protestors stomped on parked cars, ran into the street chanting and met in tense confrontations with bullet-proof-vested police. In some footage, people left shops through smashed storefronts carrying armloads of stolen merchandise - televisions, stereos, booze, food. I was just about to pack my car and head for Los Angeles for a summer program at USC. Squeezing as many hours possible into my last few days before heading toward an uncertain future “in the film industry,” I worked away in my bubble, stocking ice, filling glasses with white wine and mixing the occasional black russian.
I had only two contacts in LA and few skills; just a fierce drive to “tell important stories for women” (no I wasn’t sure what that meant either). As I watched coverage of the riots intensifying over the next five days, I realized, along with the rest of the country, that I was heading somewhere where injustice wreaked havoc on the lives of people of color while Hollywood elites fought over the number of zeros in their contracts. Later I would learn more about the pent up tension between African American and Korean American communities, between people of color and police in the neighborhoods of South Central. But at the time I just saw the justified fury over the exoneration of the white policemen who beat Rodney King to an inch of his life.
I couldn’t wait to leave Boston for LA. I wanted to be where the rage was turning to action and where injustice was being called out. I thought I was stepping into real change. Though I’m not sure how much I thought I could do, I looked forward to being there to show solidarity. But when I finally arrived in LA a few months later and settled into a tall building on the USC campus not far from where the riots took place, I did nothing. My focus immediately turned toward the cinema program I was enrolled in, making friends, shooting films, nagging professors, finding places to swim in the unbearable summer heat, and occasionally walking off campus to look for food at nearby markets. I wasn’t an outsider on campus, but off campus I stuck out, like most of my USC summer cohorts. I let that intimidate rather than motivate me. It didn’t take long for me to get wrapped up in my own drama and lose sight of the urgency and connection I had felt with the rioters just a handful of weeks before.
This and cover photo credit: Donovan Valdivia
I got caught up in telling my own stories, the type of callow, mellow dramatic drivel that privileged white girls sometimes produce. I worried I hadn’t achieved enough at 22. I tried to explain how young women put too much pressure on themselves and blamed society, because, well I hadn’t ever really suffered any injustices. I didn’t set out to make a film dealing with what happened when the communities living near campus exploded over the Rodney King verdict. Despite my proximity I didn’t even consider it.
28 years ago I had excuses. I was young and naive, insecure about my move across country, nervous about my job prospects (English degree, enough said). Today I’m fifty years old. I have no excuse. It’s time to act, it’s time to own up to my culpability, my responsibility, my part in the systemic inequality that runs through all parts of our society and ultimately, through a thousand causalities, triggered the brain synapses that fired the muscles that bent the knee that pinned George Floyd’s neck to the pavement for 8 minutes and 46 seconds to end his life.
My impulse is to say I’m sorry. I’m so desperately sorry. Sorry for my undeserved, unearned privileges. Sorry I’m on this side of the story while others are on another side. Sorry for the pain caused not just by this inexcusable death but by all the deaths related to inequality and police brutality and institutionalized racism and xenophobic ignorance and societal neglect. I’m sorry for my accident of birth. I could have just as easily been born in a brothel in Phnom Penh or a crack den in Washington DC or a favela in Rio, or, or, or. I am sorry I can walk down the street without the fear of being arrested. I am sorry I can submit my resume for a job and not worry about being passed over because of the spelling of my name. I am sorry I am statistically more likely to survive COVID because I have health care and I am sorry for the disastrous mistake that is Trump’s presidency and for people like Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence and Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner and Sean Hannity and Steve Bannon who misrepresent white males to such an extent they should be called something else - bleached maybe, ashen, bloodless.
I’m sorry for all the kind, honest, careful law enforcement professionals who would never do the things these criminal police officers have done. I am so sorry for the families of the murdered and injured and wronged. I’m so fucking sorry.
The rate at which black Americans are killed by police is more than twice as high as the rate for white Americans. This is a non-comprehensive list of deaths at the hands of police in the U.S. since Eric Garner's death in July 2014. Image Credit, NPR.
That old white guy Benjamin Franklin said “Never ruin an apology with an excuse.” Right on Ben. No excuses, no complaining. Just action.
I’m going to do what I can. To make up for my failure in 1992 and all my failures since. Writing is my weapon of change. Misstropolis is my battlefield. Will you join me? Let’s do all we can to work together toward direct action.
As Maya Angelou said, If we can’t change it right away, we can change our attitudes. We can stop complaining. We can believe. We can stop saying sorry and stop making excuses.
Don’t Complain, DO:
READ:
Barak Obama - How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change
Laura Morgan Roberts and Ella F. Washington in the Harvard Business Review - U.S. Businesses Must Take Meaningful Action Against Racism
Angie Thomas - The Hate U Give purchased from an independent bookseller of course
DONATE:
Donate to Black Lives Matter: here.
Black Lives Matter Boston: here.
Stay in touch and donate to Violence Boston, a non profit dedicated to reducing violence and addressing post violence trauma in the Boston area: here.
Give to a bail fund: This crowdsourced Google Doc of bail funds keeps getting bigger. MA Bail Fund here.
Support the National Police Accountability Project: This group of the National Lawyers Guild, helps people find legal counsel. More info here.
Support Campaign Zero, a police reform group that has been working on policy solutions based on hard data: More info here.
FOLLOW:
Layla F. Saad - author, speaker, teacher. Me And White Supremacy, Good Ancestor Podcast, Good Ancestor Academy.
Color of Change - Color Of Change helps people respond effectively to injustice. A national online force of 1.7 million members advocating for change in corporations and government to create a more human and less hostile world for Black people, and all people.
Rachel E. Cargyle - author, activist, academic. And read her article in Bazaar Why You Need to Stop Saying “All Lives Matter.”
Surely I missed a million other ways to act. Please share them in the comments.
Be an ally and advocate after the protests end.
