Hello, my name is Claudia Rankin. I'm a poet, essays, playwright, I teach at Yale University.

Five years ago, June 2015, I wrote this piece in response to this lotter of nine African Americans.

And a church in Charleston, South Carolina. And we're back here today because of the killing of George Floyd.

In the time in that span between 2015 and now, we have had a kind of consistent repetition of police brutality against black people.

We have seen this again and again and again and we can go back to Rodney King and come forward and go beyond that to Emmett Till and come forward and go beyond that Frederick Douglass and come forward.

So nothing has changed in that sense. But what has changed is the response to the killings.

What's incredible is that in five years, we have gotten to a place where the killings are still happening.

But for the first time, we have had crowds of people on the streets.

The more I think about it, I think it's the work of grassroots organizations like Black Lives Matter,

I think we're showing up for racial justice. I think in those five years, those organizations have been mobilizing people of every racial group age, everything.

And so we've seen a national movement of protests that cannot be segregated by race and American citizens are calling out for a new way of thinking about what it means to be a citizen of these United States.

And that's what we have been calling for a kind of collective we.

So here's my piece, The Condition of Black Life is One of Morning, Read by Jynina Edwards.

A friend recently told me that when she gave birth to her son before naming him, before even nursing him, her first thought was, I have to get him out of this country.

We both laughed. Perhaps our black humor had to do with understanding that getting out was neither an option nor the real desire.

This is it, our life. Here we work, hold citizenship, pensions, health insurance, family, friends, and on and on. She couldn't, she didn't leave.

Years after his birth, whenever her son steps out of their home, her status as the mother of a living human being remains as precarious as ever.

Added to the natural fears of every parent facing the randomness of life is this other knowledge of the ways in which institutional racism works in our country.

Hours was the laughter of vulnerability, fear, recognition, and an absurd stuckness.

I asked another friend what it's like being the mother of a black son.

The condition of black life is one of mourning, she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son's reality.

At any moment, she might lose her reason for living. Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person, you can be killed for simply being black.

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