"We lived in Minneapolis, Teri and I, when our kids were small. For three years we lived around the corner from the intersection where George Floyd was murdered. Every work day, I got on the #5 bus at 38th and Chicago in Minneapolis. I know that intersection. I know that convenience store. I know that gas station. I know the real estate ads on the bus stop benches. I waited for the bus on the same patch of cement where he was murdered. Our house was around the corner, but we never lived in the Minneapolis where George Floyd was murdered.
My Black neighbors and I lived on the same block but we did not live in the same city. That was Boston, too, when I lived there. That’s Chicago too: my Black neighbors and I live in the same building but we live in two different cities. In Hyde Park, in Beverly, in a scattering of other neighborhoods around Chicago, white folks talk a good game about integration, but we don’t yet live in the same city as our next door neighbors. Here’s the number of times I got hassled by a cop in Minneapolis: zero. I mean: getting off the bus at midnight, the patrol cars never even slowed down. I mean: rolling through the stop signs, they didn’t even shake their head at me. I mean: jaywalking downtown the cops called out the two Black men next to me and didn’t even notice me not break stride. The police were there to protect me from people who looked like them. The rules for white America and the rules for Black America are not the same. I lived three blocks from where George Floyd was murdered but we never even lived in the same country.
This system of supremacy that values white lives as if they matter more than Black lives flourishes in countless ways, large and small – but it isn’t inevitable and it can be undone. The Unitarian Pete Seeger said that if the world was going to be saved, it would be saved by ten thousand little things. We’re committed to doing everything in our power to undo it: learn, listen, protest, give, vote. The 19th century Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale gives us the benediction—the good word that sends us onward—forward into the work: “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
In hope, David
Beverly Unitarian Church 10244 S. Longwood Drive • Chicago IL 60643 • 773-233-7080
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Links:
[1] https://www.beverlyunitarian.org/news/news-78