The man on the face of the 20 dollar bill is the same man who once offered up to 325 times that amount for the return of a runaway enslaved person, including extra bonuses for every 100 lashes inflicted upon that man. He was a master planter, who fertilized American soil with Native American bodies and hydrated Southern cotton fields with the blood and sweat of free Black labor. Such an icon of white supremacy was he that nearly 200 years after launching the violent displacement of 100,000 nonwhite bodies, a piece of paper with his face on it was all the authorization they needed to suffocate a man to death while the world watched them do it. Big Floyd was murdered by police outside of a grocery store. See my uncles also operate grocery stores, liquor stores, minimarts and so on. That whole generation followed a pretty simple formula. Put your heads down, make your money, send your kids to good schools. See what that actually meant was – put your heads down, and don’t think about why this formula works out for you but doesn’t always work out for everyone else. Why you get to own property in this neighborhood but the people who live here can’t. Why liquor stores like yours are on every corner, but fresh produce and afterschool programs are pretty hard to come by. And definitely don’t consider a centuries-long history in this nation that includes: slavery, legalized segregation, a made up war on drugs, criminalization of Black and Brown bodies, immunity for police officers when they commit crimes, and that’s just to name a few. So what did we do? We put our heads down. We turned those Jacksons into Benjamins and those Benjamins into Benzes. We became well-educated, well-to-do, and well, accommodating. We complied with a status quo that keeps telling us that we’re “almost there,” but just not quite “them enough” until we shed every last remnant of our heritage, except, of course, for the ones that can be exploited for a diversity initiative or sold for profit. And in the meantime, we got all our music, culture, fashion, sports heroes from a community of people without ever having to reckon with the fact that we have been complicit in the violence against their very existence all along. We kept our heads down, and now the joke’s on us. We abandoned our homelands and everything we knew to escape poverty, to escape violent conditions, to escape systemic oppression, and this whole time, we remained silent while we watched those very same things happen to a group of people who are just slightly different than ourselves. We no longer have time to keep our heads down. Not now, not ever again. Listen to and learn from Black voices. Donate your time and your money to Black-led organizations and Black causes. Learn and vote in your federal and local elections. And hey Bollywood? We don’t want to hear any of this “Black Lives Matter” stuff from you, unless you’re also dealing with the casteism, colorism, sexism, Hindu supremacy and support of state-sanctioned violence that’s running around freely in your own industry right now. Black Lives Matter.
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