Injustice: On Making Things Worse

How does it feel to worry about your own mortality because of powers out of your control and systems you couldn’t even start to know how to change?

Hey, I’m back and this is going to be a bit of a somber post. The response to the blog has already been overwhelmingly positive and I thank every one of my friends and family who shared the blog in support of it.

All that being said, I thought today I’d bring to you something a bit less positive and/or aimlessly philosophical and instead talk about something all too real in the lives of so many people across the world.

For those of you who don’t know, George Floyd, a black man from Minneapolis, Minnesota died at the hands of a Minneapolis officer recently and oh boy, has the internet had something to say about it.

I can’t blame them, mostly because I too felt like I had to say something, especially since this was the second reported case of race-based violence to come to light in just the past 3 weeks. So I believed my voice had to project it’s pain and frustration for the world to see, for them to hopefully hear a cry for once.

But as I tried to figuratively put pen to paper I found myself unable to find the words to say.

Stay with me with on this but, has it not almost become too easy to lift your hands up high in support of a cause or a movement? Trying to play spokesperson by using my tiny platform has made it so clear to me how much more is required to say something meaningful and impactful. Yes, you’re black or heck, you’re a decent human being who can see a wrong being done and are not okay with sitting idly by, but if you’re going to speak to people you better have something to say.

And this is what I had to say; the world is not pretty, the world is not just. Whether you’re black, asian, female or just born in the wrong circumstance, the world is not going to do you any favours. The world is going to test your faith, your resolve, your belief in humanity and if you’re one of the lucky ones, it’s going to try and (haphazardly) apologize for all the pain it’s cost you.

A story my mom used to like to tell every so often was of one of the school entrance exercises I did when I was looking for a grade school to go to. As she recalls it, when it was all over and everyone had come out with their colouring pages, she remembers seeing me and a number of a kids not having gotten to colour ours. When I asked her the only question my little brain could think of for rationalising the disparation, “Mama, is it because we’re black?”, she didn’t really know what to say.

In the grand scheme of things an uncoloured page and a lost life are not comparable, I know. The only thing they share in common is their reason for being, but is that not too much in itself?

Yet, despite all that I can’t help but feel like the feelings I’ve let fester for so long — feelings that injustice couldn’t be escaped, that the world is unfair, that if even four year old children couldn’t escape racism, what could? — made the already devastating injustice ever more worse.

A quote I recently heard from Bryan Stevenson, a well-renowned lawyer and the man Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx starred in a movie about recently, made me come to this conclusion. The quote goes,

“Injustice prevails, where hopelessness persists.” - Bryan Stevenson

It’s always been pretty easy to talk about problems and discuss how we could solve them but the world’s tendency to develop endless inertia to oppose positive change has always made some dreams seem wistful at best and their most vocal supporters seem delusional.

And maybe that’s just me, maybe I’ve always been a bit less hopeful than I’ve lead on, but I’ve been sick and tired of being sick and tired and seeing change be non-linear or even non-existent hadn’t made me feel any better. But in the unbelievably bleak time that has been the last half year, something just changed and I couldn’t shake the feeling that there were better days to come or that they could be if we really put our all effort towards bringing them.

I’m either endlessly cynical or unapologetically optimistic, there’s no in between with me as you’ve probably observed. So I choose to just be a bit more hopeful now than I’ve been in a while. Even as it seems there is less and less to be hopeful about, I believe that I need to be even more hopeful to make up for those who may have given up along the way.

So yeah, this is a sappy, really lengthy and some may even say unnecessary rambling about how I feel injustice should never be allowed to be the norm (a conclusion many of you may have come to before reading this), but for me it’s been a long overdue realisation of my own complacency and how I may have added to the problems inadvertently by my acceptance of such as the normal.

So thanks for coming to my Ted-talk, I hope you found some hope in it :).

Originally published at http://kanovaka.wordpress.com on August 10, 2020.