2020 just won’t give us Black folks a break. In January, Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gigi died in a helicopter crash. As a community we mourned. Then February came, but by then of course the deadly Coronavirus began to creep towards the US and spread around the world. Everyone was focused on Covid-19 and Black History Month was somewhat forgotten.

March arrived and so did the Coronavirus in the US. As the entire country began to go on lockdown, Americans bought food and hoarded toilet paper as they prepared for the worst. April didn’t get much better as the Coronavirus began devastating New York City and reporting showed that Black people were disproportionately getting sick and dying.

Then we finally reached May. As we started to get over the hump of the first Coronavirus waves, protests against stay-at-home orders increased. Due to mounting pressure, states began to (prematurely) open up. Unfortunately and I suppose somewhat inevitably, police brutality (which had decreased due to people staying at home) reared its ugly head once more.

I believe that the murder of George Floyd was a tipping point. During a pandemic when millions of people are unemployed, the government hasn’t been functioning, and Black and Brown people are disproportionately dying of the virus, seeing a cop kill yet another unarmed Black man was the final straw for me and many more in my community. Protests began in Minneapolis where George Floyd was killed and then quickly traveled across the country to all 50 states.

The outpouring of support from non-Black communities and nationwide outrage is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. I’ve been organizing around the issue of police-brutality since I was 14 and I have never seen the amount of support and solidarity from non-Black people that I have now. Maybe its because there’s a pandemic and people have a lot of time on their hands or maybe its because of the fact that police brutality is not only being caught on camera but being shared on social media and spreading like wildfire. Whatever it is, I am grateful. I just hope that when this moment passes, as it always does, that the white and non-Black allies I have seen step up don’t forget about us.

As for solutions, I of course have my own opinions which are likely much more radical than most but three I think everyone can agree on is Defunding, De-escalating and Demilitarizing the police. There is no good reason that the NYPD for example has a 6 billion dollar budget with face shields and expensive riot gear, while just a few months earlier NYC medical personnel were begging for personal protective equipment and masks. We have to reprioritize our state and local budgets. Instead of over-funding police departments with military grade equipment that is then used on citizens, why don’t we properly fund our schools? I would much prefer my tax dollars go to ending homelessness and increasing school funding than to militarizing local cops. We need to teach cops to de-escalate. Police spend more time learning how to shoot than they do how to de-escalate. Across the country, states and cities are proposing significant budget cuts to police departments, finally taking cops out of schools so they can no longer criminalize students, and proposing laws to ban the use of tear-gas and rubber bullets on protesters. As a pessimist I never thought Americans would get on board with reforms like these en-masse and as quickly as they did. This moment in American history can be and should be a turning point and I have to say, I love to see it.