Hey, y’all. I was working on my season five discussion of Outlander when all this craziness started, but I decided to put that on the back burner and discuss this first. I promise that I’ll finish the Outlander post as soon as I can, but this topic had to be addressed. I know this is an entertainment blog, but what’s going on in the world today is too big and far too horrendous to ignore.
2020 is really putting everyone through hell. First Kobe and Gianna’s death, then COVID-19, later there were murder hornets, locusts, possible alien sightings, and then the night of May 24, 2020, I went on Twitter to discuss Insecure and came across this:
What Amy Cooper did is deplorable. This act of hatred—yes, hatred—is very reminiscent of what happened to Emmet Till For all you youngins that aren’t aware of the Emmet Till story for whatever reason, allow me to break this story down for you:
Emmett Till was a 14 yr. old kid from Chicago, visiting his relatives in Mississippi in 1955. While he and his cousins were in a nearby store, Emmett allegedly whistled at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant. For this offense, young Emmett was later dragged out of his family’s home, savagely beaten, shot, and drowned with a fan blade tied around his neck by barbed wire. His body was found a few days later, horribly disfigured from the assault he suffered.
The men that killed Emmett were later tried and acquitted. After the trial, the men admitted to Look magazine that they indeed murdered the young man. Decades after the incident, Carolyn Bryant confessed that she lied about Emmett’s sexual advances (she told her husband that Emmett grabbed her by the waist and told her he’d “been with white women before”).
Like Carolyn Bryant, Amy Cooper cried wolf on a black man who simply tried to enforce a rule about having a dog on a leash while walking it (and did y’all peep how she was choking the doggone dog!?). She purposely weaponized her race as well as her sex, knowing full well what the police may in that situation. Considering how she warned Christian Cooper (the gentleman recording the video) that she would “tell the police an African-American man was threatening [her] life,” and the way she heightened her voice over the phone to make it seem he was doing her and her dog harm, I believe she wanted the police to kill or at the very least, seriously hurt this man. That makes her the real aggressor, not Mr. Cooper. I’m sure Carolyn Bryant knew what the outcome would be when she spread lies about a little black boy to her racist husband and his buddies. It’s damn shame we haven’t come too much further since then.
On a good note, Amy Cooper’s ratchet behavior cost her dearly. She’s since been fired from her lucrative finance job and she’s even lost her dog. I ain’t sheddin’ no damn tears.
About 24 hrs. later, I went back on Twitter to see what was going on, and noticed a gentleman named George Floyd was trending. According to BBC News, Mr. Floyd was placed under arrest by Minneapolis police for apparently using a counterfeit $20.00 bill. For some particular reason, it took four officers to arrest this unarmed man, with Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee firmly planted on Mr. Floyd’s neck.
Despite the onlookers pleading with Officer Chauvin to remove his knee from Mr. Floyd’s neck, he refused. He almost seemed insistent about it. Thanks to Officer Chauvin’s insistence and the other officers’ flippant attitudes about the situation, George Floyd died. The media is trying their damndest to say that the knee in Mr. Floyd’s neck wasn’t the true cause of death, but I watched the video in its entirety. I saw the life slowly go out of that man as he was being suffocated (if you click the link to that video, let me warn you: it’s extremely graphic). The Floyd family had an independent autopsy conducted, and as of today, it’s been revealed that Mr. Floyd did indeed die of asphyxiation. Seeing how this senseless act occurred fresh off the Amy Cooper nonsense as well as the deaths of Ahmaud Aubrey and Breonna Taylor, just about everyone in the country is fed up.
The protests started a day or two after Mr. Floyd was killed, and they started off peacefully. But soon, peaceful protests morphed into outright riots with looters and extensive property damage. Interestingly enough, the protests spread across the country, and even made it to my neck of the woods, in Columbia and Charleston, SC. However, the end result was always the same; the protests became violent, and many people are reporting that outside agitators are the ones causing the bedlam.
Because of the increasing violence, a lot of these cities have curfews enforced, and are now under martial law, or a variation of it. The police even started attacking the press. What’s even wilder is that Anonymous, the infamous hacker group, is now speaking against the George Floyd murder and are even going as far as doxxing celebrities and politicians, including our current commander-in-chief.
I swear y’all, I feel like I’m in an episode of Mr. Robot, The Twilight Zone, and the films Heat Wave (holla at me if you remember that old school film with Blair Underwood) and Outbreak all at once. The world has gone a plum foolery fool in 2020, and I’m exhausted. I am so exhausted. It’s bad enough I have to deal with a damn pandemic that seems endless and the possible threat of killer bugs and aliens moseyin’ on down here to South Carolina, but I also have to worry about being arrested, threatened, or worse just for the mere crime of existing. And why? Because my skin is black.
We chant “black lives matter” not because we believe our lives are worth more than others, but because we’re being snuffed out in a spectacular fashion, and what’s worse is that whenever it happens, there’s always some justification for it. He shouldn’t have resisted arrest. He shouldn’t have broken those car windows. She shouldn’t have talked back to the cops. He shouldn’t have been sitting in his own apartment minding his business. She shouldn’t have ran out of her bedroom when she heard the police burst in her apartment without warning. If it’s not that, the police are called when we do the least little thing (sell bottled water, use a charcoal grill, walk in our apartment buildings, visit community pools), with the so-called victim knowing full well what the possible outcome may be when the cops show up. Meanwhile, folks like Timothy McVeigh, Jeffrey Dahmer, Dylann Roof and Travis Jeffrey Reinking (the Waffle House shooter) committed cold-blooded murders and managed to be arrested with zero incident. It’s like our lives don’t matter, and I’m sick to death of it. We need to do better.
Thanks for listening.
—Written by Nadiya
What’s your opinion on everything that’s going on right now? Let me know in the comments section. Peace.
Insights from a Southern Girl 
[…] y’all. I am so sorry this post is so late, but with the death of George Floyd, the world literally burning, more shootings and more damn COVID-19 spikes (the numbers of positive cases are also rising […]
LikeLike