Editor’s note: This commentary is by Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup, who is executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council.
The events of this past week, started by the horrific murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, are now seared into our collective conscience as Americans. Our hearts go out to George Floyd’s family and friends, the people of Minneapolis, and all who are afflicted by deadly racism.
Rep. John Lewis, civil rights icon and co-author of Vermont Humanities’ 2019 Vermont Reads choice, “March: Book One,” said, “Just as people of all faiths and no faiths, and all backgrounds, creeds, and colors banded together decades ago to fight for equality and justice in a peaceful, orderly, non-violent fashion, we must do so again.”
Dozens of unarmed black Americans have died in modern lynchings in recent years, including at least two others just during the Covid-19 pandemic. Ahmaud Arbery of Georgia was shot to death in cold blood by a retired police officer while out jogging, and Breonna Taylor, an emergency medical technician in Kentucky, was killed in her own home by police looking for a suspect from a different neighborhood who had already been arrested.
This violence is not new. Arguably, these killings of black citizens have never stopped, and many scholars have written about the history of violence from Reconstruction to today. But the modern era of this violence might be pegged to the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 by “neighborhood watch” member George Zimmerman. Trayvon was just 17, walking home from the store with a bag of Skittles.
Poet Reuben Jackson wrote “For Trayvon”:
Instead of sleeping—
I walk with him from the store.
No Skittles, thank you.
We do not talk much—
Sneakers crossing the courtyard.
Humid Southern night.
We shake hands and hug—
Ancient, stoic tenderness.
I nod to the moon.
I’m so old school—
I hang till the latch clicks like.
An unloaded gun.
And this is where we stand. With over 100,000 people dead from the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, our country is boiling over with grief and rage from racist violence. We know that the pandemic itself is killing our black and brown neighbors at much higher rates than white America – reflecting long-standing ingrained disparities in our health care system.
What can we do? We can march. We can support Vermont-based black-led groups such as Justice for All, The Root Social Justice Center, and Black Lives Matter of Greater Burlington. We can send cash and supplies to organizations on the ground in places like Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta. We can read and learn about the historical causes of structural racism and white supremacy.
Vermont Humanities recommends as starting points “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” by Ibram X. Kendi, “Black is the Body” by UVM English professor Emily Bernard, and “The Hate U Give” by Angie C. Thomas, our Vermont Reads choice for 2020.
At Vermont Humanities, we firmly believe that to take a stand now is to take a stand for all of us. For while this violence continues, none of us are free.
Permission to reprint “For Trayvon” by Reuben Jackson given by the poet.
