This post is inspired by some late night writing I ended up blurting out on my Facebook on June 4th, two days after the Black Lives Matter protest here in Sweden. It was written in Stockholm, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to fine tune it and post it here as well.
Since these protests have happened all over the world lately, physical ones as well as digital ones. I’m curious, where you live, how has the media reported about them in relation to COVID-19? Comment and let me know.
What prompted my original post was the sense of despair I felt upon following the coverage and comments that spread like wildfire post the demonstration for BLM in Stockholm. As a NBPOC (non-black person of color), it just pained me to see that the only thing people seemed to be talking about was COVID-19 and the fact that the physical demonstration was stupid, careless and selfish and that those who attended were the same.
Don’t get me wrong, I get that the current pandemic makes large gatherings of people problematic, I do! And I get that people want to talk about this. BUT! That said, I feel like we need to cover both! That has to be a possibility! We have to highlight the voices of black people who are experiencing systemic racism here too. We have to highlight what BLM really is and what it stands for. White people who were raging about this demonstration seemed to think that this protest only was about the murder (yes, not just death, but murder) of George Floyd. No. It wasn’t. Now, I’m not going to write about what it meant for the black people who attended, if you want to hear from them directly just check out these Instagram accounts: @byayshajones, @blacklivesmattersweden and @action4humanity_se.
I also want to add that the organizers behind these demonstrations in Sweden were, prior to the events clear about the fact that they’d only gotten permission from the Swedish police to gather 50 people. They’d also reached out to their followers on their respective platforms, urging people to follow the demonstration in Instagram Live rather than coming out physically to support the cause. Furthermore they’d urged that you shouldn’t attend if you felt like you were coming down with something, or if you were sick. They also asked that you stay home if you were considered at risk to catch COVID-19. They’d also done their best to uphold safety regulations by trying to keep distanced from one another, have sanitizers and masks.
Yes, things didn’t exactly turn out the way the organizers had intended, though it was hardly their fault. 8,000 people turned up. Did they all keep their distances? I don’t know? But I’d like to give people the benefit of the doubt, if they felt as though being there physically was important to them, I hope they quarantined themselves (we’ve been very liberal with quarantine here compared to other countries) and took whatever necessary precautions they had to after having attended.
It speaks volumes though, doesn’t it? That it was (and continues to be) important for so many people. Still, Swedish media have given space to people who says that the whole protest was an “imported problem” from the States and went so far as to claim that there’s no racism in Sweden. Where are the melanated voices? Where are the politicians? No one seems to be talking about the core problem here: racism and structural/systemic racism. In Canada, Prime Minister Trudeau spoke out about BLM, yet here, politicians are remaining quiet. This makes it even more important to actually discuss and give space to people from the BLM movement! Their voices need to heard too! Not just people’s and nurses’ anger over people gathering during a pandemic.
Some people have written to me and said that they support the BLM movement, but not the physical demonstrations, due to the pandemic. They’ve also said that since they support it, couldn’t it just have been moved up to when COVID-19 is no longer a problem?
Now, I’m no expert on the subject and I’m not black, but from what I’ve read and from what I’ve heard when I’ve listened; is the fact that choosing when to be heard is a white privilege in and of itself. For black people in the States especially! Where they don’t get the privilege of choosing what to fight against, COVID-19 (that, in the States, due to structural and systemic racism, kills more black people than anyone else) or something else that’s also targeting and killing their loved ones. The frustration and fear that black people all over the world are feeling needs to be legitimized and not minimized! This is very much real and I hope that you, my acquaintances, my friends and family remember this! These demonstrations aren’t about being selfish! Black people are dying, no they are killed, and they have been for years! The structural racism has killed black people for centuries, way more lives have been lost to racism than COVID-19 ever will. You have to realize that this momentum that the BLM movement has gotten recently is a way, and sometimes the only way, to get heard as a black person. To get such a widespread decease like racism to be discussed, to become a topic. So no, it’s not fair to ask black people to wait. Check your privilege! The sad thing is that when white people are getting killed, it immediately becomes a priority.
I read an article in The New Yorker and the words of Dr. Taison Bell resonated with me.
As for the Swedish case, the public are oddly (sarcasm) quiet about the fact that parks, restaurants with outdoor seating, now that they temperatures have risen here, have been crowded! On June 3rd this is what it looked like in one of the popular parks around here:
Also, don’t forget that saying that black people could’ve done things differently, or they could’ve made their voices heard in another way, is forgetting that they have, people just haven’t been listening. Besides, just think about the fact that people are out there protesting during a pandemic and still they’re voices aren’t really taken seriously by politicians and law-makers. If not now, then when?
As someone who’s been on the receiving end of racism, and who has gotten it rather often at work (not by co-workers), I just felt like needed to speak up!
You don’t have to agree with me, but at the moment I’m drained after having had so many conversations about this with people, that I ask you to keep those comments to yourself. Thanks for reading!
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