Mariella Gattini

The death of George Floyd is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to talking about racial inequalities and police brutality. We all saw on national television how he was killed. I could not believe what I was witnessing. Unfortunately, it’s not an isolated case, it’s an image we had access to. There are many more cases that have been reported over the years, and over the decades, but there are many more we haven’t had access to. That does not mean they are not a reality.

The mass media has now the great opportunity to give a voice not to the ones who speak the loudest, or the ones with the megaphone already in their hands, but to the ones who speak to reason. Journalism in general, but particularly on television, should not circumscribe their work to ratings, they should underline the reality of the ones most affected by inequalities, producing pieces of investigative reporting—almost inexistent today—because it is in everybody’s interest. Otherwise, how are they going to differentiate themselves from Facebook, whose CEO’s only drive is profit?

Today, it’s about the ones engaged in peaceful protest, who, risking imprisonment, physical peril, and coronavirus contagion, will not take the gibberish coming from the White House from now on, because they can’t afford it anymore. 42 million Americans have lost their jobs. As of today, according to the CDC, 112,133^* Americans have died of coronavirus due to a public health care that lacks the basic elements to even protect healthcare providers. The most affected are African-American and Hispanic communities. Go look those numbers up. They are in every responsible media outlet. Although I think they are underreported. The reality is grimmer.

Many would like to participate in the protests but can’t afford to get sick. The ones protesting feel they have nothing to lose.

Black Americans have been, are, and will always be part of the foundation of this country, without them there is no real U.S. identity, or even prosperity.

I came to this country to be in the company of all Americans. My life wouldn’t be this rich if it wasn’t for all of them, who mean the world to me. There is beauty in everyone of them, and value, and a vast potential. A potential they have been unable to develop due to our archaic social structures only comparable to those of Medieval Times—when only the few had all the wealth. And we are morally sinking every day. When we think we couldn’t be lower, we sink a little more. The good news is that we are awakening—to a grim reality, but reality at last. It’s better to face our lives with open eyes than to be distracted by false rhetoric.

There is so much to do. Where are the thinking heads in government and in business? I mean, the intelligent ones. The ones who use their prefrontal cortex for a living, and are strong and decent enough to create true innovation, true content, and opportunities, instead of lies, division, and hatred. Where are they?

Anyone with their heads on their shoulders living in this country can tell you that the African-American communities are of great value for us all. For instance, the remarkable film Hidden Figures shows how Black women working for NASA allowed astronauts to go to space and, astonishingly, come back safely thanks to their mathematical calculations and their willingness to participate in a society that not only didn’t want to acknowledge them, it undermined them every step of the way. These are not fictional characters, the story is based on the lives of real African-American women. We didn’t know about them because it is not in the history books we have studied from. This group of magnificent women are only a small example of African-American greatness.

I respectfully disagree with Cornel West who stated to Anderson Cooper that we are witnessing the failure of the American Experiment. This country was founded on slavery, in other words, this country was founded on human failure. If that was a social experiment, it was one destined to fail.

The ones trying to retain the wealth in the hands of the few are trying to take the country back to that era, and have succeeded in many ways. Most people work for peanuts, including professors, who twenty years ago had a salary of about $100,000 a year and could have tenure, that is to say, a job for life. Today, those who want to teach in universities need a costly Ph.D. and are lucky if they are paid the minimum wage. Some journalists are even paid with “exposure”, that means they get to write their articles for $0 (as in zero dollars) in their wallets. And the most affected by economic inequalities like the above mentioned are, guess again, Black Americans and Hispanics called “minorities” as in “they don’t really matter”.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, in reality, they do matter. Not only that, they are crucial for our development as a country, as a nation, as a democracy. This is not an emotional plea, this is a concrete assessment of what is most valued—life. The lives of Black Americans and Hispanics are not only morally valuable, they contain a promising potential, never really explored, because of the blindness of racism. Their contribution to this society has been unequivocally invaluable, but can be even greater if they had the opportunity to develop it, like everybody else.

The vast majority of them are hard-working people eager to thrive and be proud of themselves in the company of everybody else. They have love to share and dreams to make true, just like those around them. They are the hidden figures of any economic progress ever achieved in this country. At the same time, they are the most vulnerable, because the majority of them take the jobs nobody wants. Today, they have been taking the jobs that most expose them to coronavirus, therefore, they have been infected, and have died, in greater numbers compared to the rest of the population.

My hope is that, once everybody goes their own way, after weeks of protests, we never forget what we’ve learned, and never keep the suffering of the most vulnerable like a dirty secret swept under the rug again.

We have to stop thinking of ourselves as “an experiment”, or as a “melting pot”, we have to be able to look at each other in the eye and recognize the value that each of us intrinsically contain. And what we have witnessed the past two weeks, with all the protests around the country, and around the world, is our ability to unite in a common cause—our own preservation as a species. We have proven the fact that we can see that value in each other’s eyes, and now we need to take it to the next level, in our own individual interest, and in the interest of all of us because only species that are able to work in cooperation are the ones that survive.

UPDATE (July 24, 2020): Today the coronavirus death toll in the U.S is 144,734 out of 4,070,480 confirmed cases, according to Johns Hopkins University. This is serious. Please, stay safe and go to coronavirus.jhu.edu for reliable information about this virus.

UPDATE (January 3, 2023): According to the World Health Organization website, from January 3rd, 2020 to January 3rd, 2023 the U.S. has had 99,423,758 COVID confirmed cases, and 1,082,265 people have died because of it. As of December 16th, 2022, 652,464,668 vaccine doses have been administered in the country.