Just take your feet off their necks

Almost 200 years ago, Sarah Grimké, an anti-slavery and feminist activist said: "I ask no favors ... I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright." Sadly, after all this time, George Floyd died under the knee of a white police officer, while other officers looked on.

This all-too-common tragedy is not just a matter of policing and control, though that is our current focus. Income inequality, the wealth gap, segregated housing, maternal and child health disparities, food deserts, incarceration - all of this is breaking apart families and communities.

Over the past few months, on TV news, I watched video of officers with a battering ram break down doors and point guns at black children. Weeping teenagers begging police "please don't shoot me." An African American social worker weeping as she recalled the evening she came home from work and started to change clothes, only to have officers break down her door and arrest her - naked and humiliated - for nothing. Wrong address. No apologies. THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE.

African Americans have been terrorized for centuries. END IT.

Take your knees off their necks.

Our nation has built a lot of its wealth with the labor of our black and brown brothers and sisters. Slave labor, free labor, underpaid labor. It's easy to build wealth when you have an army of free or low-wage workers. With the COVID-19 pandemic, it's called "essential" work, but they are treated as expendable workers. While white America works from home, black and brown America works in nursing homes, drives buses, delivers food.

All people want and deserve their God-given dignity, freedom, and self-determination. We want to stand, upright and proud. We want to work. We need to earn paid sick days so we can take time off when we're sick and still pay our bills. We want to earn paid personal days.

Humanity is diminished when one group devalues the worth of another, when we turn our backs to each other. Let's stand with one another and be the community and country that we were meant to be.

• Allison Anderson, of Arlington Heights, is a member of the Faith in Action Team at First United Methodist Church of Arlington Heights and a member of United Methodist Women.