2020: (Not) A Year in Review

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2020.

Twenty-damn-twenty.

Whew.

I'm pretty sure 2020 will be one of those years that will achieve noun status. Cats'll be like, "Don't come in here tryin' to 2020 me!" Whew.

As we look at the fourth day of 2021, we're still dealing with the crashing waves of 2020. We're neck-deep in the quicksand of a global pandemic that has taken the lives of 350,664 U.S. Americans as of this morning. The pandemic has destroyed our national and local economies while increasing income insecurity and housing insecurity tenfold. The United States government has failed to help people and small businesses, bickering over bills that have offered very short-term solutions while leaving millions of U.S. Americans in a state of anxiety as unemployment benefits and federal aid dwindle. This public health crisis, of course, had to happen during an election year. And not just any election year. An election year where U.S. Americans had to choose between two old white men who engendered little faith in their understanding of the insidious threads of racism and white supremacy being the lifeblood of a country "founded" on unceded land. Two white men with easy-to-research histories of perpetuating and benefiting from their connections to white supremacy prompted arguably the most visible imagery of how racist the United States truly is as a nation. And all of this deciding and dying was going down alongside months of national protests connected to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black lives at the hands of law enforcement. People took to the streets, chanting and marching for policing reform while the police continued to kill and harm Black bodies. Those same law enforcement agencies teamed up with the National Guard and lashed out at protestors and public scrutiny, refusing to protect and serve if they had to be held accountable for their actions and tactics. Portland, Oregon, the white-ass place where I break my bread and rest my head, became the epicenter of inaccurate national news reports touting that the whole damn city was overrun by violent rioters and perpetually on fire. It got so "bad" that Portland was dubbed an "anarchist jurisdiction" by the now departing President of the United States (we ain't sayin' his name; he's practically Voldemort, as far as I'm concerned). And let us not forget the Supreme Court becoming overwhelmingly conservative, putting reproductive rights, trans rights, and civil rights that it took countless movements and decades of hardship to acquire in precarious states.

So yeah. Twenty-damn-twenty.

I have watched as so many of us, myself included, said out loud, "F--- 2020!" When the ball dropped, and people started butchering the words to Auld Lang Syne at midnight on January 1, 2021, many people began touting that they can now feel hope again. I've even seen many of y'all say things like, "2021 equals hope," and "The real New Years Day will be January 20, when Joe and Kamala are sworn in, and we can leave 2020 behind." 2020, a calendar year, has become the villain in this narrative. It's the scapegoat for all of the troubles many of us have endured over the past 12 months. From businesses closing and people losing their jobs and homes to an increase in hate crimes and the visual scars of police brutality, the main thing people have said is that they can't wait for 2020 to end. 2021 represents hope. 2020? Phooey!

Someone will say, "2021 will be my year!" And you know what? Go for it. Do you, boo-boo. I hope 2021 brings all of your hopes and dreams to fruition. I wish you and yours health and wealth in the new year. I hope Joe and Kamala bring you some base-level "normalcy" to the political machine and that all of their decisions warm your heart. But before all of that, I think we need to be real with ourselves. The bulk of the trials and tribulations that transpired this year have nothing to do with 2021 being "cursed" or some form of bad luck. Other than COVID-19 itself, many of the issues many of us faced in 2020 aren't new. They were already waiting in the rafters for their chance to drop down on our heads on January 1, 2020. They have been there. They've been dropping on people's heads for decades, centuries. And hell, even some of the hurdles produced by the pandemic were waiting in the wings as well. Do you want to know what 2020 was?

2020 was one of the most transparent windows we've had into what it looks like to live in a country that has never really thought about how its systems and "culture" are dangerously broken.

Lack of support and funds for small businesses and entrepreneurs from marginalized groups? The ever-increasing wealth and income gaps? The fights for equal and equitable pay and living wages? The deeply-embedded racism and white supremacy that permeates every state and federal institution in this country? The history of law enforcement and its violent relationship with Black and Brown communities? The overall ambivalence when it comes to the harming of and healthcare access of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people? The perception that anything calling out the status quo or the blatant and overt hate of non-white, non-hetero, non-cisgender people as "unpatriotic" and "unamerican?" We were dealing with all of that well before 2020. 2020 itself wasn't the problem.

The United States of America is the problem.

2020 was a year where many of this country's proverbial chickens came home to roost. We should've addressed people barely getting by and being one paycheck away from homelessness decades ago. We are a country with the wealth and means to help our citizenry, yet we continue to push boot-strap nonsense down people's throats while blaming them for "not trying harder not to be poor." We've been a country that could not handle a national crisis for countless decades. It's sad but not surprising that we could not mobilize as a nation and minimize the amount of damage this pandemic has done to families on multiple levels. And I mean, c'mon, y'all. We live in a country built on the near-genocide of its rightful owners. This is a country soaked in the blood, oppression, and generational trauma of kidnapped and enslaved people. We didn't deal with any of that in 2020 in a tangible way because white people and non-Black folx eventually tried to take over Black Lives Matter protests and tell Black folx that they were protesting wrong. In short, we did nothing to create a sustainable social impact that we could see reverberate for decades to come.

But you know, 2020 was the problem. Good riddance!

We still have Brown children and their families separated from one another and living packed together in the human-sized equivalent of dog kennels. Yeah. It's still happening. It never stopped. We didn't just leave those behind in 2020. It just dropped out of the news cycle and the public view because as a country, we have never been able to prioritize something like Brown folx being detained and living in subhuman conditions as something that needs our time and concern.

Meanwhile, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities have grappled with enduring the most harm, loss, housing insecurity, and financial instability in this country than any other populations during this pandemic. 2020 was just another example of how every national crisis in this country's history has done the most damage to the most marginalized communities and continues to do so due to systemic oppression. Black, Brown, and Indigenous folx lost their jobs at a higher percentage than their white counterparts and have had the most challenging time regaining employment that doesn't put them and their families' lives and health in danger. While all of that was happening, white people voted in record numbers during a pivotal presidential election for a white cis male President and an administration that has openly placed people of color and marginalized communities at risk for over four years with their words, views, and policies. We ended up having the same conversation about that man and his policies in 2015 when he ran for office, yet white people still voted for him and his hate in droves. And his opposition was a white cis man who has a questionable history with racism, white supremacy, and oppression. That's not a 2020 thing. That's the history of politics in this country. 2021 will likely usher in a new administration that will aim to get us back to where we were as a nation four years ago with some minor improvements. But the President will still be an old, problematic, out-of-touch white cis male, so I doubt Black lives and race relations will finally have a real place in the national political conversation outside of some somewhat symbolic gestures. And don't get me started on the workplace.

Most of us work for organizations that are sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, racist, classist, and white supremacist at their core. Even with a summer of protests and civil unrest, many of our workplaces got tired of frontin' when it came to caring about Black lives and slowly stopped talking about it or focusing on anti-Blackness as they went into the autumn and winter months. They effortlessly went back to what brought them to the dance: not caring about persons of color/culture unless the heat is on and they have no choice. Think about how easily your company went back to American workplace cultural norms. Then think about where that left Black employees, how it made your Black colleagues feel as the world erupted outside their doors. 2020 ended for Black folx the same way every year before it ended: with the number of us who were dead, traumatized, and trying to stay afloat and survive outweighing the number of us thriving and building generational wealth and strength.

2020 brought a lot of changes in the way we live, work, and survive. It was a rough 365 days. I'm glad to be facing a soft reset of the calendar and to have a new year to engage with after the 365 days before it. But the more things change, the more they stay the same. We can't look forward without acknowledging that 2020 might've been the worse year of some of your lives but that there were whole communities who had to deal with everything I touched on earlier, plus a deadly virus. Until this country, our communities, our workplaces, and even many of us personally decide that 2020 wasn't just some fluke or anomaly and that rainbows aren't on the horizon for everyone, we will see no real social and systemic change. Until this country has an honest reckoning with its past and present and begins facing the complicated history and reality of this country's ongoing hate and systemic oppression, nothing will change. And no new administration or rosy outlook is going to change that.

I'm not saying all of this to rain on your parade. You have the right to exhale after a heavy 365 days. We need to exhale collectively. We need to exhale to allow us all to mourn our dead and let the stress out of our bodies and souls. But when you exhale, do so with the understanding that in 2020 a Black man who had the white knee of a white man in a blue uniform take his ability to exhale away. Do so with the understanding that a Black woman minding her business in her home will never exhale again after bullets from law enforcement officers' weapons ravaged her body and took her life. And exhale while you accept that some of us don't get to walk away from 2020 and say good riddance. Because for some of us?

We've been living in a version of 2020 for our entire lives.