Hundreds of protesters take a knee outside the Portland police station on Tuesday. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer
At 6:30 on Monday evening, my partner and I were on a biking mission to see how Middle Street was opening up to pedestrians. As we rode up to the corner of Franklin and Middle streets, I was completely unprepared for my emotional response to the protesters’ peaceful work. The protesters chanted his name. They lay in the street, hands behind their backs, chanting, “I can’t breathe.”
Until that moment, I had been on a frivolous mission. My jacket was a very light gray and stood out in the crowd of people dressed in black. I turned it inside out, to the darker side. The protesters wore black from head to toe, including black masks. The contrast between where I was in my head and the depth of the protesters’ anger, despair and commitment to peaceful protest and radical change, could not have been starker.
Stunned, I got off my bike, wishing I could go into the crowd and knowing that would be wrong. I had no mask. I stood on the corner across from Hugo’s, straining to hear the leader’s words and taking in the emotion of the crowd, the calm of the police. I was reminded of a close family friend’s death when I was 5.
David had come to New York with three siblings, from Guyana. Just 10 days after his arrival, David, at 16, was walking down the street in the Bronx with a friend, laughing. A white man asked him what was so funny. Then he walked past David and his friend, turned around and shot David in the head. David died because he was black in the Bronx in 1971.
My dad said that the police wouldn’t bother to investigate a white on black murder – even one that took place on an open street in the middle of the day. The senselessness of that experience came flashing back to me as the protesters began saying George Floyd’s name, and I thought about his fear and confusion. I imagined his family and friends trying to make sense of their loss, like my family in 1971. George Floyd, George Floyd, George Floyd. David Fraser, David Fraser, David Fraser. The tears came in a flood as I stood on the corner by the police cars.
My family didn’t take enough action to pursue justice for our friend. After all these decades of deferring justice, it is time for white people to show that they care by taking action to make this country just as safe for black children as it is for white children. We have to make it safe for their parents, too, so families stay whole. And we need to take stock of how much we stand to gain, by taking care of all of our neighbors. Imagine how different the headlines in today’s papers would be, had we addressed racism in policing 50 years ago!
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