A brief note to the unconvinced about the reason for the protests | Opinion

• Anighya H.D. Crocker is the conductor of the Willow Oak Chorale, minister of music at Ebenezer Baptist Church and assistant conductor of the Vanderbilt Chorale.

I am a Tennessean. I was born in Robertson County and raised in a community nestled between tobacco fields. I am a student at Vanderbilt, where I study opera and American history. I am a choral director and a music minister in a Baptist church. I love Titans football and Dolly Parton. I am your neighbor.

I am also a Black man.

I choose these things as my preamble to highlight what we may share. As both a conductor and a historian, I am constantly made aware of humanity’s commonalities. When I stand in front of my church choir, my job is to unite our individual spirits towards a common goal. As a historian, I pore over records and testimonies of individuals to coalesce a unified image of whatever particular event or occurrence may be within the purview of my research.

In short, commonality and unity are inextricable facets of the human experience. So why does it seem we are so divided? Why is it that when one group states “Black Lives Matter” another group responds, “All Lives Matter”? Why is it when a man says to another man, “I can’t breathe” he is met with deadly indifference? Why is it that peaceful protesters are lauded as “heroes” when they are maced and trampled just the same as “looters and thugs”? Why do so many people concede that there is a problem with race relations in this country yet denounce the demonstrations that have engulfed it?

Commonality vs. conversance

I wager the latter is because we have conflated “commonality” with “conversance.” You see, a white reader and I may have in common a favorite football team or hometown. But a white reader and I share no conversance with what it means to live as our respective races. This is to say that I can’t claim to have firsthand experience of what it means to be white in America any more than a white man can claim the inverse.

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However, we can all commonly learn the history of Black people in America. From the time 20 African slaves stepped onto the dock of Jamestown in 1619 to the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, the Black body was property. After the Civil War, millions of newly emancipated Black people roamed the South as vagrants. While the 13th Amendment brought freedom to slaves, it did still permit slavery as “a punishment for crime." For this reason, the Southern states passed the “Black Codes,” making vagrancy illegal. By doing so, the fields of the South were once again filled with Black bodies.

Fighting for the freedom of others

In the coming century, Black men would be drafted into World Wars I and II, the war in Korea and the war in Vietnam. Though they fought for freedom, it was not their own. Private Felix Hall, a Black 19-year-old from Alabama, volunteered to fight in World War II. He was lynched, in his uniform, on base at Fort Benning by his fellow soldiers.

Black people were not guaranteed an unimpeded vote until 1965. Black people were not guaranteed fair housing until 1968. Black people continue to be incarcerated at a rate five times higher than white people. Even this abhorrently brief list displays an obvious chronology of systematic oppression against the Black race in America. With this in mind, it is simply inconceivable that 400 years of deliberate sabotage could be shirked in less than one generation.

A shared hunger for equality

I titled this work "A brief note to the unconvinced" because my target audience is the white reader who may feel as though these protests are in some way unjust or ignorant. Our nation’s streets are inundated with all races and creeds of people. They are there because of what they have in common: a hunger for equality. You see, though they may not be conversant with each other’s personal experience, they don’t have to be. It is simply enough that they have felt the winds of change and allowed themselves to be swept up.

There is no requirement for you to understand the daily Black experience in this nation. But why condemn a people asking for a life they have been denied 400 years? George Floyd’s death was a symptom. Through unity and commonality, we may heal the illness.  

Anighya H.D. Crocker is the conductor of the Willow Oak Chorale, minister of music at Ebenezer Baptist Church and assistant conductor of the Vanderbilt Chorale.