TW: mentions of racism, racial hate crimes and suicide
The majority of the research community in the field of Anthropology agrees on the peaceful coexistence, 150,000 years ago, between the first humans of our species (homo sapiens) in the depths of South Africa. Their sources also prove that 70,000 years ago, humans started migrating from South Africa to Arabia and from there, they expanded towards Eurasia. Beside the fact that our national identity reveals a lot about our external appearance, our culture and our beliefs, this evolution doesn’t cancel our history, our very own beginning.
The same humans, the first humans of our species, were coloured and they managed to adjust themselves and survive among past human species like homo erectus, homo soloensis and homo denisova.
Nowadays, thousands of years later, we still face questions regarding who belongs where, who’s better than whom, who’s DNA is better.
We roll our eyes at the person next to us on the bus, we protect our bags once a person of colour is standing next to us, and we’re more likely to collide with someone that’s looking different than us.
George Floyd isn’t the first, or, sadly, the last person of colour to lose their life in the US. Two months before this incident, Ahmaud Arbery was murdered by two white men, because of the sneaking suspicion of being a criminal. In 2014, Michael Brown was murdered in cold blood by a Missouri officer, because he suspected that the cigarettes Brown bought from a regular store was illegal. In 2015, Sandra Bland was verbally and physically abused by a police officer who randomly stopped her for an inspection, and three months later she decided to take her own life.
As Reni Eddo-Lodge had mentioned in her book “Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race», when Barack Obama became the first coloured President of the United States, the American community was quick to claim that we are now living in a post-racist era. However, as long as incidents, like the ones mentioned above, where people of colour wrongly lose their lives, continue to happen, we can’t suppose that racism is gone.
As long as black children are taught from a young age how to properly face police officers to avoid unfair accusations or even to avoid getting murdered, we come to the conclusion that a post-racist era still remains a utopia.
The anger, the rage and the desperation caused by George Floyd’s case are deeper-seated. They’re the response and the result of a routine, a status quo that wrongs, abuses and murders effortlessly. It’s not the forged twenty-dollar bill, the supposedly forbidden cigarettes, or the peculiar glance that drives biased US officers to resort repeatedly in an abuse of their power. It’s the communal American belief that people of colour will never be good enough to reach white standards.
The American Dream turns Nightmare for many coloured children that are preparing themselves on how they must put the double of effort to even be considered as good as white people. The American Dream has failed, because in the path towards glory it swept away hundreds of innocent souls.
I’m white and aware that I’ll never understand or feel what people of colour feel living in the West. Nevertheless, I hurt as much for the unfairness us, homo sapiens, created at the expense of our own people. The more the beliefs that shaped us and helped us evolve limit our field of thought and place us in stereotypical moulds, created by past generations, the more we will have specific traits in mind regarding who looks dangerous and who doesn’t, who’s more valuable and who isn’t, what we can accomplish and what others can’t.
History is repeated as long as we repeat the same fatal and painful mistakes.
Photo editing: Simeon Maniatis