By Nasrullah Abdurrazaq
I grew up in Nigeria, in a community where everyone looked like me, everyone shared my struggles and my pain. For all intent and purposes, we all woke up each day for the daily bread and strove to keep roofs over our heads, water in our tanks, or light/electricity in our houses. It wasn’t always easy but there was a sense of a shared struggle in a community, a city, a nation as we all strove for progress, towards a better future. That struggle (towards a better future) after all, is how I ended up in the United States. Despite the culture shock, the difference in lifestyle, and even the language to an extent, I was insulated by my immediate family and friends. For the better part of my first year in the US, I was surrounded by folks I’ve pretty much known my whole life. Racism and discrimination based on skin color was something I had heard of but never truly understood. How could I?
Then came the summer of 2016. I was doing research at Texas A&M Kingsville, Texas. I woke up that morning, got on Twitter, only to find the name Philando Castile trending. The shock I felt seeing the video, the emotions that ran through my head, my entire body, is not something I can quite convey with words. What could he have done to deserve that? What sort of offense or crime could he have committed to deserve being shot (in front of his partner and daughter no less)? All morning I tried to wrap my head around what I had just seen. This is a society that constantly belabors the fact that too many black children grow up without fathers, and yet here is a father that was killed in front of his daughter with little to no regard. The thoughts continue, and by noon that day, I couldn’t keep working. I needed to be alone, to get my head straight, but I couldn’t. Instead, I found myself crying. I had no idea who Philando Castile was, had no relation to him, but that day, I felt a kind of pain that I had never felt before in my life. It took a while, but I finally understood the plight of the black person in the United States. They say “time heals all wounds” but not this one. If I felt this horrible, how must his partner, his daughter, his mother, friends, how must they have felt at this horrible tragedy? I still find myself tearing up to this day at the thought of what happened to Philando Castile.
But like most people, combining high emotions with productivity is not a good combination for me. I was still an undergraduate student trying to shape his future. So, I compartmentalized. I did my best not to think about it. I kept my head down, kept busy with everything else in my life at the time. School served as the perfect escape for me. Occasionally I’d see the news about another black man or woman dying from a police encounter, I’d be disappointed and sad for a bit, and then I’d quickly bury myself back into whatever schoolwork I had to deal with. That was probably the only way I could deal with it.
I finished the first year of med school in May. And boy was it a long year. I was so excited about the break. It was only going to be four weeks long, so I had made plans to pretty much sleep and hang out with my family the entire time while doing as little as possible. Then George Floyd was murdered, again from a police encounter. However, this summer, there was not going to be an escape. There’s only so much sadness one can keep bottled up in a dark little corner of their mind space before it becomes unbearable and one has to deal with it. After all, I had done just that a few months earlier, when I heard the news about Breonna Taylor. The months of May and June became an emotional roller coaster for me. It all came rushing back in. All the names from the past 4 years (and some even further back) resurfaced. For weeks, my emotions cycled between anger, sadness, disappointment, and helplessness in no particular order. And as we as a nation continued to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic, Black people and their allies were forced to hit the streets in droves, to protest another unlawful death of another Black man, to fight for justice, to demand equality. By the time school was scheduled to begin again, I was very exhausted, and this time, it was not going to be enough of an escape. There was just too much to deal with.
But for a little while, I felt hopeful. People were listening now, change was coming. After all, we had just witnessed the largest protest in our nation’s history. Even allies from other countries protested in support. If we all just did our little part in whatever space in society we were a part of, we could make some major progress. Or so I thought. I am now currently in the midst of another pseudo-break, barely 3 months past the horrendous murder of George Floyd, and another Black man, Jacob Blake, was shot at 7 times, leaving him potentially paralyzed from the waist down, with his 3 children in the car.
Another family destroyed, hurt, traumatized in ways that many of us can only imagine. The Black community is once again made to feel an unending loss, and pain, one that is rekindled ever so often by these deadly police encounters. And every single time, we are left to ask the same questions: where does it end, when does it end, how many more is it going to take? Why did he or she have to die?
I have had my fair share of police encounters (mostly because of speeding). I truly believe in their importance in society and the work they do, but I’d be lying if I said I feel comfortable around any of them. I truly don’t. I am now at a point in my life where the mere sight of police painted car or SUV scares the hell out of me, so much so that I can spot them anywhere on the road (even in opposing traffic on the highway). And don’t get me started on the sirens. I now do my absolute best to avoid any sort of interaction with the police because there is no guarantee of what the outcome might be. And I highly doubt I am alone in this.
It is not a healthy way to live. We should not be so afraid of those who are supposed to represent the best of our society, those who are supposed to uphold the law and keep our neighborhoods safe, but here we are. I certainly cannot say that I have the same level of optimism I had earlier this summer. But I will keep working, I will keep fighting in my own little sphere, even just for a chance that I and those who look like me will have a much easier go at it, so that we may one day yet focus on what we are meant to do or be and realize our highest potentials without the need to constantly fight for restorative and social justice.