“Carrying Casket”, by Jammie Holmes, Library Street Collective.
“When the protests started in the streets of Denver last spring, days after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, I watched dozens of people marching with anguish and affliction on their faces. Several of them were crying, or clearly had been. When I watched the video of the final moments of Mr. Floyd’s life, I myself felt the telltale symptoms of grief: a clenched stomach; a surge of adrenaline; and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. As they unfolded over the next days and weeks, the protests seemed like a moment when Black grief — a feeling familiar for Black Americans after the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till and so many others — might finally become collective grief for the rest of America. ...”
“George Floyd’s murder felt like everything was the same and nothing was the same, said Miski Noor, an activist in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed by a white police officer a year ago on 25 May. ‘How many times have we seen Black death go viral?’ asked Noor, the co-founder of Black Visions, which advocates for abolition, an approach to public safety that does not involve the police. Noor, who helped found the group in 2017, knows that to abolish policing you also must confront systemic racism and the weight of history. And Noor also knows as the child of Somali immigrants, that the issues are global. ...”
