Today is my due date, and I can’t stop thinking about George Floyd.

I keep telling myself I shouldn’t be thinking about “things like this” right now, that the moments before I give birth should be spent in meditative relaxation. Surely, now is the time to reflect on the beauty and hope of new life, not the pain and ugliness of this world. But my mind keeps wandering back to a Black man’s face being flattened into the ground by the weight of a cop’s knee, his eyes begging for mercy he would not receive. 

The promise of an empty bassinet and carefully folded newborn onesies sit in front of me, but I can’t breathe. As I read the news of George Floyd’s murder, I feel that same bronchial constriction that I’ve felt each time I hear of a new police assassination of a Black American.

I am reminded that, as a Black person in America, we have rarely in life taken a deep breath. As my airways tighten, and I search for the right relaxation mantra to calm myself, I think of my two Black brothers, my Black father, and my Black cousins in Minneapolis. I beg my mind not to play the slideshow again ― the flashing images of the many ways I’ve imagined finding out that one of them has been killed in a chance police encounter. I can’t breathe.

Every new police murder of a Black victim digs at the same wound, the initial trauma I felt as a school-age child when I learned of this legacy ― the Emmett Tills and Rodney Kings and all who followed them.

This painful discovery was cradled by my short lifetime of already knowing; even as children, we know the reality of racism before we are taught to name it. By age 8, I had already been taught to fear the police as a matter of basic social hygiene.

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