I often wonder how many younger white people know on a really visceral, sense memory level, just what it was like to live through the span of years between Trayvon Martin and Ferguson.

See, I was Trayvon Martin's age, almost exactly, and it made everything feel like it was

happening in some kind of weird time bubble. I spent 2012-2014 in a state of near constant fear for the black men and boys in my life, and at every turn those fears got validated and reinforced.

My little cousin was being targetted and harassed until they finally arrested him for having a BB gun in a town full of rich white boys who had done far worse without consequence, the year before the superintendent committed fraud so she could shut down the high school that

served his majority black and brown neighborhood. Our moms had to fight like hell to keep him safe during the fall out of that and we're all still pretty much convinced that the only reason it worked was because our moms were both white.

The year after that, while my black partner was being threatened with arrest if they physically defended me from the man who had threatened to kill me, Tamir Rice was killed for the very thing that nearly ruined my cousin's life. The year after that, the same exact officer who

looked my partner in the eye and said "if we get called and things got physical, we'll arrest you both" hauled my partner out of our apartment in the middle of the night in cuffs and I spent the next four hours trying to materialize bail money out of thin air because not 6 weeks

prior, the cops had killed a black man in custody in the next town over.
When the protests in Ferguson started, it felt like a fever pitch of the emotional climate. I watched with the rest of the world as nearly every political leader turned up dead under suspicious circumstances

I remembered the stories about people who vanished like that from my own community, and the way it sounds when a grieving mother screams. Ferguson felt like going to war, and the tanks and sonic dispersal weapons didn't fucking help.

It was two years, but even now thinking back I have a hard time comprehending it as anything less than a decade. Every single day there new names, and never just one. I honestly wondered if that was going to be what finally broke us down.

Turns out that it was. But not for the reasons I thought. No, instead it broke us down because after those two years, the very politicians who had always turned their backs on us when I was a kid started lauding the movement while quietly doing nearly everything possible to kill

legislative progress, and one by one the young leaders were killed, with what felt like systematic precision, until the movement splintered.

I've grown up under the microscope of federal surveillance designed to take out activist infrastructure since the days of phone trees.

I don't believe for a second that it's a coincidence that it was the lynch pin leaders of the movement who were murdered and frankly neither should you.

But they do it because of how effective it can be. And I watched us spin our wheels against the full force of a white

supremacist power structure while shitty allies dug the mud out from behind our treads instead of in front.

And now it really HAS been nearly a decade, and our movements are still being targetted, in more and more blatant ways.

So here's my point. Watching the footage out of Minneapolis feels the way Ferguson did. We're seeing the beginnings of that same escalation here, only this time it's set against the backdrop of a pandemic and the worst recession in nearly a century.

This time, it is so painfully clear that people feel there is nothing left to lose.

And given what happened to us the last time when that wasn't the prevailing perspective, I need people to keep their eyes on this. I need people to understand that this is a moment when either

the demands of the movement will have to be met, or people really will go to war for this.

It's not a stretch, not when the country spent two years systematically culling everyone who refused to sit down so recently. Not when active genocide has been the country's response to

hundreds of social movements since its inception.

Here's my other point. This will hurt. This will make you afraid. If you were too young and too white to remember the last time, know that this is how it feels every time. You're not weak, it's not hopeless, & you're not

imagining it. Your life is about to get a whole extra layer of scary.

So keep your head on a swivel, find the strength somewhere to stay kind to each other, and learn the names of the martyrs who were once our most promising speakers.

Take the time now to learn about Information Security & don't get careless. Much like with COVID-19 & mask wearing, it's not just about you. Every time you don't mask up, you risk lives in your community. No one is perfect so don't beat yourself up, but understand it.

& find your joy somewhere. There's this idea that you can't or shouldn't be happy during a genocide, & certainly you won't be giddy & carefree, but survivors have turned to disidentification to remake the systems of our oppression in our image for generations. It's time honored.

I tend to sing and write. I know people who draw or cook or simply daydream. All that matters is that you leave yourself room to exist even when they try to take that space from us.

You're real. You're powerful. If you weren't, they wouldn't bother with all this.

To quote hozier: the jackboot only jumps down on people standing up, so you know good things are happening when the jackboot needs to jump.

It's jackboot time. So lets make sure the jump breaks their fucking legs.

It took less than a day for this thread to be proven right, and there have already been half a dozen murders in the last 24 hours alone including Mr. Floyd.