This is uniquely different from the way the world grieves the death of a celebrity, though to die the way George or Toyin did means that one becomes extremely well-known. Your face becomes ingrained in the memory of the public. It’s painted, illustrated, and surrounded by flowers with artful type running underneath it. You become a digital asset—eye-catching and square-shaped so that you can be easily shared, screen-grabbed, and re-shared, giving people an easy visual to accompany their own reflections about you or themselves. Prominent politicians, activists, and celebrities speak out in your memory and raise legal and funeral funds for your family. You become the latest face of a movement. But you’re not here. Not living. Not breathing. All that promise, cut short.
I started writing this epilogue about the unjust killing of George Floyd and how it devastated so many Black mothers like myself, hearing him cry out for his own mother while a police officer suffocated him. I started writing about how this experience is a heartbreakingly shared one for many Black women as a whole, praying for the safety of our sons, brothers, and fathers in the face of a world that routinely brutalizes Black men. I thought about my own experiences as I sifted through a wave of grief and testimonials on social media. George Floyd’s death had not only sparked a wave of outrage and activism against police brutality, but a global movement in which we began to interrogate every aspect of racism.
And then news of Breonna Taylor’s unjust killing broke, and we all learned of how three police officers gunned her down, shooting her eight times in the night during a no-knock raid on the wrong home. We saw images of her with her girlfriends and family members, smiling and carefree. We read her Tweets. She was optimistic about her future. She was ambitious. She could have been any of us. And so we eulogized her by talking about how her death impacted us and how as Black women we have to advocate for ourselves and each other, always. Because if we don’t, there will be no national outcries for justice. We talked about our trauma, our grief. And I began to instead make this epilogue about the experience of being a Black woman thrust into the role of educator, one repeatedly asked to comment on Black pain and explain how racism works to a wider, White audience, while processing grief. (Something, mind you, I refused to do.)
And then we learned of Tony McDade, a transgender man killed by a police officer responding to a call about a stabbing. And then Toyin, a 19-year-old Black Lives Matter protestor who was found dead a week after Tweeting that she had been sexually assaulted. Oluwatoyin, Yoruba for “God is worthy of praise.” We lifted her up. We said her name. And in the process, we shared our own experiences of neglect and abuse.
The hashtags were coming too fast and furious. The more lives lost, the more words. White people, newly awakening to the reality of racism, confessed past misdeeds and owned up to their privilege. While Black people gave testament to the reality we knew all along: racism has always been here. We were grieving the loss of another life. But this time, Black people weren’t the only ones doing it. For the first time, people from all walks of life, the world over, were speaking out in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. We grieved the brutal killings of women and men we didn’t know. And we also saw ourselves in them. Their deaths had compelled us to look inward.
The experience of considering one’s own life experience in the face of death is not new. We try to find meaning in the latter, and make sense of the former. In her memoir, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America, Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, wrote, “When I am out and about, people recognize me and they want to talk about him, what his death meant to them, what I mean to them still. They just can’t help it.”
Only now, we broadcast it to each other. During the weeks following George’s murder, everyone had said all the things on social media, television, radio, and in print, but words and performative outrage wouldn’t bring back 26-year-old Breonna or 25-year-old Ahmaud, or give George breath, or promise my son a future in which Black Lives Mattering was not a debate and police brutality against Black people wasn’t a public health crisis.
“What if we go back to America and what happened to George happens to me?” my son asked me one morning as we listened to a radio broadcast about the riots that had erupted in America. And I didn’t know what to say. I told him he is loved, valued, intelligent, a child of God, and the firstborn son of Matt and Kenya, a gift we prayed for. I told him he stands on the shoulders of all who have come before him, a people who have survived World Wars, Jim Crow, enslavement, the Middle Passage. I joked and told him he’s a Hunt and a McGuinness, the product of strong stock. I said a lot of things. But I wasn’t sure if any of those things answered the question.
So I hugged him. Held him close and quietly observed the stillness in his face, the sadness and confusion that seemed to be settling in as he tried to process it all. In parenting him, my husband and I had always made it a priority to make sure he associates Blackness with love, joy, and prosperity rather than oppression and suffering.
This is a child whose first President was a Black man. It was a great source of pride for me that a Black president was the only president my son knew for the first years of his life. Not that this could protect him from the realities of racism.
My closest girlfriends and I had been agonizing over how to discuss Black Lives Matter with our small boys. Because, of course, it matters. It’s been mattering. “I mean think about it, it’s hard to learn that people don’t like you because of the color of your skin,” one of them explained.
My son had not seen the footage that sparked the fires burning in America; a White police officer, Derek Chauvin, pinning George face down to the ground, using his knee to kneel his entire body weight onto the unarmed man’s air passageway for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. My son didn’t have to.
Talk of George surrounded us, even in COVID quarantine. As much as my husband and I tried to ration our news intake around the kids, the story was there. On CNN, as we channel surfed our way to the children’s networks. On BBC Radio 4 and WNYC as we cooked. During our social distanced strolls through the park with friends. In the Black Lives Matter signs that began hanging in windows in our neighborhood.
I can’t breathe. The tragedy of these words becoming a hashtag against the backdrop of a global COVID-19 pandemic, a virus that ravages the lungs and has hit the Black population hardest of all was too much for the heart to take. But I can’t breathe also became the thing that re-sensitized us to humanity and mortality after months and months in which coronavirus death tolls had become so high that we practically stopped noticing, the numbers in the headlines looking like distant, abstract figures. I can’t breathe. The words took on a life beyond the man and became a call to action for us all, appearing on t-shirts, in murals, and on protest placards.
I can’t breathe. I had no words. Grief filled my mind like a fog. Grief for Breonna and Toyin. And so many others from Sandra Bland to Eric Garner and back to Emmett Till and beyond. Grief that their deaths had touched my son and his own understanding of how people regard one another.
George Floyd and the police brutality that cut his life short was not only the talk of America, but the United Kingdom. The world. And as the outrage turned into protests, riots, and a global social justice movement, the fury became less about George Floyd and more about us. And the thing powering our connectivity—those blue-lit square boxes—began to feel less like a conduit to a warm, comforting bond and more like a compulsion. We needed a break from our scrolls. Because between COVID, escalating racial conflict, and the unexpected passing of heroes from John Lewis to Chadwick Boseman, our feeds had begun to feel like an endless obituary. And yet there was the overwhelming sense that we couldn’t afford not to tune in. The defining losses and gains were coming so thick and fast. Social media was the platform for both our comfort and horror; the tool we used to organize, but also the very thing that threatened to mentally and emotionally undo us.