By Brandon Bader, Head Women’s Volleyball Coach at Anoka-Ramsey Community College & 2018 AVCA Diversity Award Winner
It was May 25, 2020, and yet another killing of a black man at the hands of police took place, except this time it was on camera and for almost 10 minutes the entire country saw a man take his last breaths as George Floyd’s life slipped away in front of everyone. To the Black community this added to the long list of painful moments involving us and the police, but there was a small positive light shining through this tragedy, dialogue, and collective outrage.
Those in the Black community know the drill — don’t draw extra attention to yourself, don’t be combative, keep your hands visible, and NEVER reach for anything. If you’re lucky by following a few of those simple rules your interaction with the police will be over and done without becoming a statistic. This reality, however, is not one shared in the white community, but once Mr. Floyd took his last breath it forced many to wonder if the stories and the fear was all true and they were just blind to it.
In the coming months people talked, they engaged, and they learned. Many friends reached out to me personally to say how awful what they saw was, many having re-watched it multiple times in disgust, wondering how a sworn officer of the law could willingly kill someone so casually with his hand in his pocket. Many of the “just comply” and it will be fine crowd shifted to say that training practices needed to be reviewed and altered and that there is a policing problem in America.
Even still with all of the awareness, all the media coverage and the massive wave of protests, there was still angst and fear that this incident would turn out just like the others — an officer getting acquitted in the court of law dealing yet another crushing blow to a hurting community. It’s always easy to draw comparisons from Rodney King to OJ Simpson, but this was now the highest profile case involving the Black community in quite some time. Despite the overwhelming evidence, despite the number of eye-witness accounts, and despite a defense that relied heavily on theoretical evidence there was still a very real possibility that Derek Chauvin and his defense would get the single juror they needed to hang this trial.
It never got to that point and with Derek Chauvin being convicted on all three counts there was a collective sigh of relief which manifested itself for many in tears because it was the first win many had experienced in this situation. The Black community doesn’t want special treatment, we want equitable treatment. We want to feel like our life has value and feel safe in our community because those sworn to protect us aren’t targeting us in the process. Hearing the guilty verdict on Tuesday April 20, 2021 provided hope that things may be changing for real this time, but hope is not the end of what we want to accomplish.
Everything is so polarized and divided, so much so that saying Black Lives Matter has become a trigger word when in reality all it means is, we want our life to matter more than it does right now. We in the Black community know that while this is a great first step, it by no means solves the issues that still plague us. Race is still a problem in America. Policing needs reform and we have a lot of action items to hit to make this country a more inclusive place for everyone. Tuesday was a good day; hopefully there are more of them to come.
-Head Women’s Volleyball Coach at Anoka-Ramsey Community College Coon Rapids, MN
-AVCA Diversity Award Winner; Class of ’18
-Doctoral Candidate at Drexel University (Doctor of Educational Leadership Class of 2024)
