I’ve spent the past week and a half watching and listening to marchers around the world protest the murder of George Floyd, the black man who was killed by a cop kneeling on his neck in Minneapolis. More than that. They’re protesting 400 years of racism. 

“Get your knee off our necks,” Al Sharpton said last night at George Floyd’s funeral. 

People have been marching in Toronto too, protesting not only Floyd’s murder but the suspicious death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet in the west end of the city: a young black woman who is said to have fallen from her balcony while the police were in her apartment. 

The question occurs: How can I help?

I know that’s not anything resembling an important question, but it’s one I have to ask.

First of all, I can’t join the marches, which I support. The COVID virus is probably spreading through the marchers’ ranks. Fortunately the demonstrations are largely led by young people who are overwhelmingly likely to get mild cases of COVID if they get anything at all. In fact, I admit to a bizarre sense of relief that people on the side I support will develop a degree of immunity from infections acquired during the marches, balancing the immunity probably gained by the MAGAs in their Re-open America demonstrations. (“Let my hair stylist go!”)

The anti-racism marchers in Toronto say they’re self-isolating afterward from friends and relatives who are at greater risk of COVID complications. But I can’t isolate myself from my immuno-compromised husband, so I can’t risk joining them and bringing the virus home.  

I also can’t bring myself to watch the video made as George Floyd died. While it’s crucial that it was circulated, and I know that people feel they’re bearing witness when they watch it, I can’t stand to spend eight minutes and forty-six seconds watching a real person being killed. Floyd isn’t an actor in who’s going to jump up at the end of the scene and head for the craft services table. He’s being murdered. It’s a snuff film. Even the thought of seeing it makes me ill.

Another thing I hesitate about doing: putting up posts on social media pointing out that I’m white and that I benefit from white privilege, both of which are true. I loathe virtue signalling. It’s too tied up in self-righteousness and kale. During the #metoo publicity surge, my friends and I rolled our eyes about men who put up heartfelt posts about learning from what we were saying and declaring themselves born-again feminists. 

Proof is in the pudding, sweetheart, we said to each other. What are you actually going to do to make things better? Not just today, but for the rest of your life?

Of course, many men have since made an effort. Largely, I suspect, men who were pretty decent to begin with, but maybe they’re trying a bit harder now. We’ll take it. 

Yet I can’t help feeling the same thing about white folks like me standing up and apologizing for our white privilege (which has indeed granted me advantages). Of course, I know that many white people who take a stand on this are lovely, and that some black protesters have said they want to hear white folks finally cop to the privileges we’ve enjoyed all our lives.  

They’re being forbearing when they say so, I suspect. Thinking, Okay, sweetheart, since you finally want to say something, try this. (But what are you actually going to do about it? Not just today, but for the rest of your life?)

So I’m cynical. But cynical in a weirdly hopeful way, despite my demographic. 

COVID is a disease that largely kills old people, and some very reputable scientists say it’s going to do so for a long time. This means society will probably get younger over the next decades, and I can’t help hoping that younger people might finally be able to fix a bunch of messes that (virtue signalling) I’ve been protesting for a long time. 

Cynical self: Mark Zuckerberg is 36 years old, so let’s not get too hopeful. Class trumps demographics. 

But that leaves my question. What can I do to help? Here in my white person’s privileged self-isolation?

Nothing much, frankly. 

A former student is asking people in the film community to mentor emerging filmmakers of colour, and I’ve said I’m happy to help story-edit scripts, presuming anyone wants me to.

Aside from that? 

Something lame: I picked up a book from my to-read pile by the black writer, Colson Whitehead. His previous novel, The Underground Railroad, is one of the best books of fiction I’ve read in the past couple of years, along with George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, which I recently re-read for the fourth or fifth time.

Whitehead’s new novel is called The Nickel Boys, and I’ve been hesitating to open it ever since a friend told me that it’s a difficult journey to set out on.

The novel is centred on a high school senior named Elwood Curtis. According to the jacket copy, Elwood is sent to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, “…a grotesque chamber of horrors where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear ‘out back.’”

Sounds pretty much like the residential schools where indigenous children were imprisoned here in Canada.  

I closed the book, finding that I wasn’t up to a story about abused children right now. No George Floyd video, no Nickel Boys. My nerves are already rubbed too raw.

Instead, I re-read The Underground Railroad. It’s a harrowing book too, but the fact I’ve read it before makes it familiar territory. Inventive. Playful. Enlightening. Can’t recommend it too highly.

I finished it again last night, then woke up at 4 a.m. from a nightmare. I can’t remember what it was about, but it was an anxiety dream about trying to get away, which I’ve been having ever since the virus came to Canada.

I thought of George Floyd’s last words, which I know even without seeing the video.

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. Please don’t kill me. 

Thought in my head as I turned on the light: The virus is already doing that. When are people finally going to stop doing it, too?