By Veronica Chambers, The New York Times, August 18, 2021
The spring and early summer of 2020 was a tough time for me and many other parents. The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and the spotlight on previous victims such as Elijah McClain broke our hearts again and again as we watched graphic videos of police-involved killings and stayed glued to the news. There were days that I woke up crying and went to bed crying.
I tried to hide these tears from my daughter. But she had just turned 13 and the pandemic meant we were all together in an apartment. Plus she had a phone. So she had been reading more of the news than I would have liked. A dear friend’s son, also 13, refused to jog in their bucolic suburban neighborhood after Ahmaud Arbery’s death, in defiance of his soccer coaches’ instruction. Our children were suffering, and I know that my friends, of many different backgrounds, were struggling to explain the headlines against the backdrops of safety and possibility they had sought to create in their own homes.
That spring, my daughter attended her first protest march. She came home, her arms and legs buzzing with excitement. The gathering, which took place in our relatively small town of Hoboken, N.J., had drawn thousands of people. Organizers and community members, some of them young women like my daughter, spoke at the march, and she was in awe of their voice and their power.
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