I am Tired.

I am tired. I am a middle-class, middle-aged, white woman with all the privilege that entails, and I am tired. So I can only imagine how bone-deep exhausted people of color must be. I am struggling with how to be an ally, when to say something and when to shut up and amplify others’ voices. When should I step in front and bear the brunt for those who will not survive it as well as I, and when should I be stepping back and be the support structure for others? 

But that’s an easy struggle compared with trying to figure out if someone is going to kill me for going on a jog/walking while wearing a hoodie/carrying a water pistol/forgetting to use my turn signal/writing a bad check. I bounced more than one check in my early 20s. I had no idea that was a crime that could come with a no trial death sentence. But that’s the rub, isn’t it? Because for me, it never would. 

Any time you see the police use force and you have to question whether it was a legitimate use of force or not, it probably wasn’t. But if you are really uncertain, use the middle-aged white woman test. Imagine that the person the police are dealing with is a middle-aged white woman. If the police officers’ actions still seem reasonable, then they probably were. If they don’t, well…

Because the problem here is that the police and a lot of society will try to tell you that black men and boys are inherently dangerous. That they are so dangerous that any time the police have to interact with them, for whatever reason, the police have the right to act with lethal force. When it comes to black people in this country, forget trying to get a fair trial, they are lucky to make it to trial. 

Is looting going to fix this? Of course not. But you know what, in the same sense that looting will not fix it, neither will protesting. The only thing that will fix it is the rest of us giving a damn, the rest of us caring as much about a black man’s life as we do about not being able to go out to dinner. The only thing that will fix it is when the loss of a black man’s life means more to the rest of us than just another inconvenience that will mess up our morning commute. 

And no matter how much better or worse national leadership can make these situations, the solution does not start at the top. It starts on the ground. It starts in our own neighborhoods, on our own streets. It starts in our communities with our police officers and our local leaders. This is not something we can or should pass on to someone else. We are the hiring managers. We have to do the work of interviewing and vetting the candidates for our local leadership positions. And then we have to hold them accountable. We cannot be afraid to put our local leaders on performance improvement plans.

But we also cannot fall for the idea that there is one magic fix, one magic leader. We cannot fall for the idea that as long as we elect the one right mayor/governor/president everything will suddenly become better. It holds a lot of appeal because that once again takes the job off of us. As long as we elect this one right person, we don’t have to do the work anymore. And that’s not true. No matter who we elect, we as the people still have to do the work of fixing our society and creating a culture change.

In Seattle this weekend, a police officer knelt on the neck of a protestor they were in the process of handcuffing. Think about that, this is a behavior so ingrained that, in the midst of a mass uprising triggered by a police officer kneeling on a man’s neck, a police officer knelt on a man’s neck. Another police officer told him to stop. Some say it is only because they were being filmed. And that is possible, but you know what, the man who knelt on George Floyd’s neck was being filmed. He and the other officers there knew it, and not one of them thought that maybe he shouldn’t be kneeling on the man’s neck. So this is a small piece of culture change, and it is one we have to keep pushing on.

This weekend, a police officer was able to speak up because they were being filmed. In the future, one might be able to speak up because they might be being filmed, or because there are witnesses to the action. Would it be nice if that kind of pressure was not needed? Of course. But until we get there, we have to keep applying the pressure. We have to let the police and law enforcement know when their behavior is not acceptable. Just like as parents we tell our kids “I am watching you” to keep them on good behavior, we have to keep telling our law enforcement that we are watching them. That their job is to serve and protect our entire community, not just some of it. We have to get them to understand that we care as much about the lives of black men accused of passing counterfeit bills as much as we care about the lives of white women accused of passing bad checks.

Because here is the really hard part for the rest of us to grasp. Our police forces are a reflection of the rest of us. They may be a lagging factor, but they are still a reflection. These practices and behaviors are not new. They are ingrained. And for the police to change, we have to change. We have to put in the hard work. We cannot be mad only when a “good black woman” gets killed in her own home by police serving a no-knock search warrant in the middle of the night for a man that was already taken into custody and then her partner being charged with her death for defending their home from what he reasonably thought were home invaders. We cannot be mad only when the police use excessive force to execute a warrant at the wrong address. We have to be mad any time this happens. We have to be mad about all excessive force, regardless of who it was aimed at. We have to ask ourselves if police can take the young white man who shot up a black church into custody alive, why are so many black men accused of misdemeanors killed before they ever go in front of a judge? If we do not believe our police have the right to be executioners for one subset of society, then we must take away the rights we have given them to be executioners for another subset. Because make no mistake, they believe we have given them that right.

So here we are. And I am tired, so very tired, of having this fight. And I want to stop. Fatigue is setting in. But we cannot. We cannot stop, we cannot become complacent. As parents, we never stop telling our children not to pull the cat’s tail, not to kick the dog, not to bite their sibling. No matter how many times we have told them no, we do not stop telling them no, because the safety of the pet or other child and the safety of that child, matters more to us than the fatigue. In the same way, the safety of our entire communities must matter to us more than the fatigue. 

If we want the police to value the lives of everyone in our community, then we have to pay it more than lip service. We cannot react only when the most egregious instances of police violence are thrown in our faces. We have to show that the lives of our brothers and sisters of color matter more to us than our comfort, convenience, and fatigue. Every single day. Every single time.