“Come up with a better way”
Downtown Memphis June 4th, 2020
I saw a video on Facebook the other day. It was in the setting of one of the many protests around the country set off by the death of George Floyd. This protest, like many others, began to turn violent. In the middle of one of the many crowds, a man named Curtis Hayes, a young man named Raymon Curry, and a 46-year-old man who had a more aggressive approach to change, and dozens of protesters standing by catching this monumental moment on camera. In the video, you can hear the 46-year-old man screaming, “I am tired of it, always standing around going Kumbaya, ain’t nobody coming to protect us.” I think that as black people and people who stand with us, we can all agree that we are tired, tired of all of it. We are tired of the senseless killings, the unjustified beatings, the oppression, the covert racism, and how history repeats itself over and over again. In the midst of him passionately expressing how he had reached his ceiling Curtis Hayes intervened with his passionate plea. He talked about how he was tired too, but how the protest was becoming a violent riot was not the way! Looking on was a 16 year Raymon Curry who skipped school to attend the rally because he was tired too, at 16—participating in what was quickly turning into a riot, mostly learning the wrong way to fight back. The wrong way to be heard. Curtis Hayes turned to the 16-year-old boy and said to him, “What you see right now is going to happen ten years from now.” “In 10 years, you’re going to be right here again, so what I need you to do right now at the age of 16 is come up with a better way.”
There is so much confusion around what a “better way” yet effective way is. Some of the anger has turned into rage, as Curtis Hayes said. People are tired of being peaceful, tired of being patient, tired of falling victim to racism. We want our voices heard, but the peaceful way doesn’t seem to be working, we want to fuck shit up, but tearing up our communities doesn’t help anything either. Yes, they see us, but then they get a chance to justify our deaths. We also become what they have perceived us to be in the first place.
In an interview, Curtis Hayes did with Good Morning America’s Robin Robert’s she asked about what he thought coming up with a better way meant. He responded with, “getting educated about the legislation, the constitution, and rights as a citizen of the United States.” To know is to have power. To know is to be able to retaliate effectively. I know that “to know…” is not what some people want to hear, and some people are not listening, but from the perspective, I am looking from, I can see the dream that Martin Luther King had for us. I can see the prayers of my ancestors, and I can see the prayers for my children and their children’s future.
As a 23-year-old black woman, I have so much life ahead of me, as we all do, and I would like for us to be around long enough to be able to impact the change that we would like to see. In anger, our judgment gets cloudy, and the smoke takes a while to clear. I would hate for the smoke to fade, and the first vision that we have is one of place that we had left far more damaged to than when we arrived. We can come up with a better way.
