It’s Daunte Wright.

It’s Adam Toledo.

It’s George Floyd.

It’s more than just them and how they died.

It’s about how a Black female police officer in Buffalo, NY tried to stop a fellow officer from putting someone in a chokehold and was fired for it. And how it took until yesterday – 15 years later – for a judge to finally say she shouldn’t have been.

It’s Ahmaud Arbery who was just trying to go for a jog.

It’s not about cops, it’s about policing and power and who gets to exercise it and what the consequences are and whether those consequences include death.

It’s eight Asian women who were at work in Atlanta, and an elderly Asian woman kicked on the ground in New York, after a year of escalating, targeted harassment and violence against people who share Asian-American / Pacific Islander backgrounds.

It’s about how someone could think “he had a bad day” was a reasonable explanation and it had nothing to do with race or misogyny.

It’s about an insurrection and a coup based on a Big Lie, fueled by mostly white men brazenly feeding it and groping at power. It’s about how that insurrection can kill a cop, but the people who powered it went back to work in the House and Senate.

It’s Jim Crow. It’s internment camps.

It’s the three-fifths compromise. It’s the 13th amendment.

It’s how we talk about “earning” the right to vote and not “losing” the right to vote.

It’s a system, linked together through chains visible and invisible, and written down on parchment.

It’s how it infects everything, including the way Black and Latino hospitalizations and death are 2-3 times higher from COVID-19.

It’s about how we created a system meant to enforce a set of values. It’s about how the values were more important than what happened to the person the gun was pointed at or even the person holding the gun. It’s about fear used to preserve power for some at the expense of many.

It’s about grappling with the fundamental truth about who we have been as a country. It’s about how the phrase “this is not who we are” is so often an unwitting lie because of how our failures have outpaced our ideals. And how all of that prevents us from stopping the higher rate of Black death.

It’s watching certain political leaders in this country double down on disenfranchising Black and Latino voters even as the results of that centuries-old strategy are played out as murder in video after video, month after month. And how that’s a trauma on top of a trauma.

It’s about not being able to sort out which injustice you’re angry about today.

It’s about barely having time to mourn and grieve the mass murder of South Asian women at the hands of a misogynist fueled by his own supremacy before we’re plunged into another exercise in shared trauma.

It’s an endless parade of garbage excuses and narratives that try to tell us that unless you are middle class and white and working the right sort of job and usually a man then you deserve what you got because you didn’t act / look / raise yourself right.

It’s poverty, it’s white supremacy, it’s misogyny, and it’s violence as a means of allowing all of it.

It’s to preserve power over others, those whom our founding documents called less than.

It’s being tired of (as a Black woman I know put it yesterday) “performative sadness.”

It’s about finally acknowledging that anything less than a complete overhaul is a failure.

It’s about being already exhausted and not knowing where to start.