Dear brothers and sisters,

Today’s blog post is a little different. I usually write content to inform, educate and enlighten, but, honestly, this post is just an outpour of the flood of emotions that I’ve been harbouring since the end of May. Maybe you’ll be able to take something from it anyway. I found it difficult to release a post in June. Before the death of George Floyd, I had started planning an article on the topic of the Muslim Concentration Camps in China, but by the night of the 25th May, it pains me to say that my mind could no longer spare much thought for the suffering Muslim Uighurs in China. Writing about anything other than the Black Lives Matter outcry and the protests that followed seemed inappropriate. But trying to sum up everything I felt towards the outcry also felt inappropriate. When you have been invested in the fight for black freedom and the fight against police brutality for years, and you watch yet another video of another one of your black brothers being callously murdered, what words are there left to say? No set of words seem detailed or extensive enough to accurately capture the range of emotions that myself and millions of other black people around the world have been feeling over the past six weeks. So, I decided to remain silent instead. Not completely, but at least on this blog. Sometimes silence seems like the only way to explain the inexplicable.

We’ve all been grieving since the end of May. We’ve all found ways to process our trauma: some of us through activism on social media, some through protests and others through simply disconnecting from everything and everyone. Personally, after three weeks of posting about, talking about and even breathing about black lives mattering, I know that I most certainly needed a break from social media by the time we were mid-way through June. I found my brain physically hurting from immersing myself in petitions for innocent black death row inmates and news reports of lynched black people found hanging from trees. Every day, I was waking up with the aim of surrounding myself with material about black suffering so I could enlighten others about black suffering. But it can all be too much sometimes. I needed time to recuperate. I needed to let my brain go at least 24 hours without a constant reminder that being black is political in the world that we live in. I know I’m black. But I’m also a human being with hopes, dreams, ambitions, fears, worries and anxieties. These don’t just go on pause just because non-black people (for the first time in forever) have paused to pay attention to black pain. I have a life to live – a black life at that (which is devoted to the advancement of the black community) – but a life, nonetheless.

However, here’s where my internal conflict begins… because George Floyd also had a life full of hopes, dreams, ambitions, fears, worries and anxieties. As did Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Michael Brown, Austin Sterling, Trayvon Martin, Regis Korchinski-Paquet and thousands more, whose names will never make it to a hashtag. These people did not choose to become martyrs. They did not choose to become exhibits, examples or even figureheads. So why should I choose to stop fighting for their justice? Why should any of us have the freedom to opt out of a race war that has crippled our people for over 400 years? Don’t get me wrong. Black people definitely do need to give ourselves time to heal from both the generational trauma and the personal trauma that we have accumulated from living under white supremacy. But healing must be followed by more work. We need to help ourselves, so we can help the rest of our community. We need to rebuild our strength, so we can rebuild our race. 2020 is just the beginning of our generation's fight against racism. No matter what sector or industry you are working in, no matter what field of study your degree is in, we all have pro-black things to be doing. Our work is far from done.

Yours sincerely,

A tired, yet hopeful black woman

“I’m tired of marching for something that should have been mine at first .... I’m tired of living everyday under the threat of death. I have no martyr complex, I want to live as long as anybody in this building tonight, and sometimes I begin to doubt whether I’m going to make it through. I must confess, I’m tired .... I don’t march because I like it. I march because I must.”

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Speech from Chicago Freedom Campaign, July 1966.