By Debbie Allen and Patricia Thrushart, Cofounders, Poets Against Racism USA
A few weeks ago, Poets Against Racism USA, Poets Against Racism in the UK, and The Watershed Journal Literary Group presented Poets Against Racism: In This Together 2022. We held this second annual virtual event on the second anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. As with the first version, In This Together 2022 centered the words of an invited speaker and featured poets on the racism, bigotry, and hate that persist worldwide. In this post, we discuss progress made since George Floyd’s murder and gains yet to be accomplished and describe how action by social justice poets and their supporters can help achieve the ultimate goal of eliminating the evils of racism, bigotry, and hate.
Good has happened in the two years since George Floyd’s death. The Minneapolis police officer who kneeled on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes was convicted of murder, and the city of Minneapolis agreed to a $27 million settlement with the Floyd family. According to a Forbes interview with Campaign Zero Executive Director DeRay McKesson, 19 states have enacted laws addressing police use of force and every state has placed restrictions or bans on no-knock raids. And on the same day we held our 2022 event, President Joe Biden signed an executive order intended to help reform policing at the federal level and to create a national database for monitoring police misconduct.
When President Biden signed the executive order on policing, he stated, “Two summers ago…we saw protests the likes of which we hadn’t seen since the 1960s. They unified people of every race and generation.” Biden went on, however, to acknowledge that “progress can be slow and frustrating and there’s a concern that the reckoning on race inspired two years ago is beginning to fade.” Indeed. The impetus for the executive order was lack of action by Congress, which failed to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Moreover, many other aspects of systemic isms remain. Efforts are under way in many states to suppress the rights of voters in marginalized groups. Inequities related to education, incarceration, health care, housing, and so on endure. A dire unwillingness to uphold honesty in school curricula exists. All the while, unbearable acts, ranging from calling the police on a birdwatcher to murdering people doing their weekly grocery shopping, rage on.
So work remains. We all know that. The question for the PAR USA community is this: What can we do? As the cofounders of PAR USA, we hope that holding events such as In This Together and promoting the work of social justice poets in general will stimulate people to think in new ways about racial issues and perhaps take action to initiate or contribute to change. To that end, we encourage you to take some actions of your own. Start by reading the poem West Broadway: A Plea, featured on May 20, which contextualizes protests that occur in response to horrific acts of hate. Use the poem as encouragement to submit your own antiracism, antihate poetry for inclusion on our Featured Poem page. Review the allyship resources on our In This Together 2022 page to learn more about ways to support marginalized groups. Share links to the recordings of our In This Together events, which are posted on our YouTube channel. Comment on these events too! You can comment on YouTube or in response to posts about individual 2022 participants that we’ve shared on Facebook and Twitter. Your reaction may be the spark that ignites another to share the recordings further. The more people we reach, the more likely we are to make an impact and effect change! Finally, send us your ideas via email (poetsagainstracism.usa@gmail.com) about other ways our community can contribute to the fight against racism, bigotry, and hate.