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AMERICAN DIARY: To be black and a journalist at this moment
May 31, 2020 1 min, 37 secs

But the concept of space has a different meaning for African Americans.

It’s about finding places in American society — white society — where we are free to just be.

Tired of how routine violence against African Americans at the hands of white people has been and continues to be.

Angrier still that as an African American journalist, I must explain, again and again, how dehumanizing this all is?

For years, my identities as an African American and a journalist have been in sync.

I woke up Tuesday morning to video of George Floyd, a handcuffed man, struggling for breath while a police officer pressed a knee into his neck for several minutes even after he stopped moving and pleading for air.

Bystanders captured the video and can be heard increasingly pleading with the officer, Derek Chauvin, and three others to come to his aid.

The week’s misery had begun on Memorial Day when a black man asked a white woman in Central Park to leash her dog.

On it, he captured Amy Cooper calling police to report she was being threatened by “an African American man.”.

On Friday, I awoke to the words of the president of the United States: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, summoning the civil rights era with a phrase used in the 1960s by a Miami police chief and by George Wallace, an aggressive segregationist.

If African Americans being killed by police is the throughline of our times, then the drumbeat of aggressions for existing in white spaces is the steady rhythm.

And white men hang governors in effigy for not reopening fast enough as African American deaths rise.

Barack Obama, the nation’s first and only black president, tackled what getting back to normal means for African Americans in a statement Friday about George Floyd’s death.

Uhura’s presence as a respected, competent black officer assured little Amanda of her place among them.

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