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When the president of our country casually tweets, " When the looting starts, the shooting starts," invoking a direct quote from a police chief during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. When police refuse to reprimand or prosecute their own because they'd rather protect each other than really reevaluate their fatal practices that disproportionally affect Black people. When you're gaslit with platitudes like, "Statistically, it won't happen to you." But it happened to your cousin, and your friend, and your's ex's father.
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When a community of parents has to teach their children how to behave around cops before they learn how to write in cursive. When this has been happening not for decades, but centuries, traced back all the way to slavery. Especially when the people who are dying look like you. Are the police listening? Is our government? It doesn't feel like they are when deaths keep happening over and over again at the hands of the institutions that are supposed to protect us, and all the killers get sentenced to is administrative leave with a slap on the wrists. To quote Martin Luther King Jr., "A riot is the language of the unheard."Īnd we are unheard. "Fuck crook'd cops." "Fuck capitalism." "Eat the rich." "Make America pay for its crimes against Black lives." Walking around my West Hollywood neighborhood Sunday morning, I kept pausing to read the graffiti still covering many of the storefronts I often passed by. And while we've come a long way, it still is a protest today because not all members of our community are treated equally. This uprising effectively launched the gay rights movement we know today. For six days, Greenwich Village was thrust into protests and violent clashes with the law. She, and many more LGBTQ+ folks, unknowingly sparked a revolution. Johnson, clapped back against the brutality. The clientele was done putting up with the mistreatment and Black trans women, like Marsha P. Officers physically assaulted and hauled people out of the bar for arrest. In the twilight hours of June 28, 1969, NYC police raided the Stonewall Inn. Gay bars were the only refuge for LGBTQ+ people, where they could be left alone and celebrate themselves. Variant gender expressions incited vicious responses from the public and police. In the 1960s, it was illegal for two men to engage in any kind of romantic physical expression. Y'all know the Stonewall uprising began as a riot, right? "I can't even go outside to walk my dog," one wrote on Facebook, unconcerned about the deaths but ready to digitally fight the masses over the slightest inconvenience. Scrolling through my social media, I was struck by the number of white gay men-who hadn't bothered to mention the deaths of Floyd or Ahmaud Arbery or Tony McDade-seething about the looting in their neighborhood. One of the gay epicenters of the world was thrust into chaos, and Pride Month would begin in just under 48 hours. "You guys be careful in this sadistic world." "People are mad and sad," she typed out to her two children. She'd recognized some of the buildings on the news as places she visited, storefronts just blocks away from me. The city of Los Angeles pushed an alert about a citywide curfew at the exact moment my mother texted me. I poured myself a heavy glass of wine for my nerves. The life of George Floyd-and the many other victims of police brutality-cannot. I didn't mourn the broken glass and cars set ablaze. I watched people stop their cars in the middle of the street to run inside businesses to loot, taking advantage of the chaos. "They're going to blame Black people for this," they kept repeating. I watched white women spraypaint "Black Lives Matter" on the side of a Starbucks at The Grove, and Black women tell them to stop.
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I watched people dressed head-to-toe in black smash windows of places I've shopped. I watched friends get shoved onto the ground and hit with batons. I watched the police approach the protestors in riot gear, attempting to deescalate the situation while actually doing the opposite. But the anger, the sadness, and the fear were etched into every photo and video. Thousands crowded the intersection of Fairfax and Beverly, the sidewalks I'd jogged down just three days prior. It almost felt like I watched police cars go up in flames in real-time. Twitter made it was easy to see what was going on in Los Angeles. Many protests were able to remain peaceful, while some were derailed.
These protests popped up around the country to honor George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and the many more over the years who have died at the hands of police violence. But loud bangs, seven helicopters circling overhead, and endless sirens echoing through my normally quiet street confirmed my fears: it hadn't remained as peaceful as it intended to be. Protests I couldn't bring myself to attend were processing through my neighborhood Saturday. I can hear the faint sounds of explosions as I sit on my balcony in West Hollywood.