Miscellaneous
We are amid COVID-19, everyone is talking about that they hope everything will be back to normal, and as it turns out, there is no way of going back and that normalcy of life. Then, we are home-cooped up and afraid of what’s next, and George Floyd gets killed inhumanly and brutally… on camera for the world to witness. If you are human, you got angry, sad, or sick to your stomach We haven’t seen anything like this in our lifetime, and we are still in quarantine because of COVID-19. It brought fear, uncertainty, over 40 million people are unemployed, we are social more distant than ever, and the only thing keeping us connected to friends, family, and the news is the internet. It’s been two weeks since the news broke of George Floyd’s brutal death. I went silent and posted a black square on all my social media pages and stopped posting all content in solidarity of the Black Lives Matters movement so that those posts could be seen and heard. But now is the time to take action and not wait for someone else to fix that problem. A problem that has existed for over 300 hundred years and has never been fixed. Let’s come together as a community to correct this injustice once and for all. I am not an authority on equal justice, but I am learning. During my blackout week, I decided that it’s time for me to take concrete action, so I started gathering information by watching movies, reading books, articles on racial justice to become more informed on how I can help. 4 Steps I took this week, and I am not getting it all right, but I am trying We watched on Netflix: When they see us and 13th by Ava DuVernay I am reading How to be an antiracist by Ibrahim X. Kendi. Donate: We donated to the Equal Justice Initiative, but there are so many other organizations you can help. My podcast has very little diversity, and that is going to change. I have been actively looking and contacting African American women to be on the show. If you listen to this and want to share your message, contact me at heike@heikeyates.com I haven’t don’t enough, but I am promising to listen more than I speak, to share my platform for inclusion, and that it represents diversity on all front. But it’s not enough, and we can’t stop there because if the media dies down and we move on to the next story, we solve nothing and forget about the problem. We need to unite to face and solve this problem together. I am sharing 5 steps that you can take this week to be part of that change. Let’s not stand by and hope this will go away because if we want a different outcome, we have to do something different.