No Silence for Injustice / Chris Kornman

Artwork by Shirien Damra

Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor. George Floyd.

Please say their names with me.

It's 2020, and a pandemic has laid bare the institutional and systematic racism still fully baked into our routines and governments.

As if this weren't enough, white people, with the police at the lead, keep killing black and brown people. A jogger. An EMT sleeping in her bed. An unarmed man who once again invoked the phrase "I can't breathe," as literally as it's ever been said.

It's not hard, in retrospect, to understand and feel violated by the injustice and callous disregard for their lives, even for me, a white man.

It's a lot harder to acknowledge that I'm much closer to the problem than I am to the solution, just by casually existing in a system that effortlessly insulates people like me while at best ignoring, and at worst targeting people like Ahmaud, Breonna, and George.

Their lives mattered. Their deaths matter.

I don't have many public platforms at my disposal, but this one affords me an unfiltered editorial freedom (with apologies to my colleagues for the political nature of this post, as it's neither my habit nor the expressed purpose of Zinc Asterisk to write about this kind of topic).

But I'd encourage you, reader, to think a little bit about your place in this too, and raise a riot in your own sphere against injustice. If you're saying nothing, you're saying quite a bit about how little it matters to you.