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Black Lives Matter, so where were you?

Jeanne Sager - Columnist
Posted 6/8/20

Finding someone you're looking for in a crowd is hard. Finding someone you're looking for in a crowd of people wearing masks? It's more like a game of Where's Waldo.

But find people in the crowd …

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Black Lives Matter, so where were you?

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Finding someone you're looking for in a crowd is hard. Finding someone you're looking for in a crowd of people wearing masks? It's more like a game of Where's Waldo.

But find people in the crowd at Sunday's Black Lives Matter I did. Friends from childhood. Friends from adulthood. Friends of my teenager's. Acquaintances we've met along the way.

Slowly I adjusted and started to make sense of the eyes-only mechanism of identifying people. Pardon me for being behind on this. I've been largely in quarantine thanks to COVID-19 and asthma. I don't get out much.

But I adjusted. I looked around more and saw more faces I knew. It felt good to see others in my community out on the streets, out there standing up for Black lives.

There were hundreds of people. Black people. White people. People of other races.

But the more I looked, the more I realized I didn't know a lot of these people.

I was born over the bridge from Callicoon but brought home from the hospital to a home just a few miles from downtown. I spent 12 of my school years here, graduating at 16 years old and leaving for college. I came back at 19. I haven't left.

I have worked for the county's premier newspaper in some capacity for more than 20 years of my life.

I know a lot of people.

A lot of people know me.

But in a crowd of hundreds — one friend ventured a guess that we had as many as 500 people in evidence — I didn't recognize a good half.

I'm glad we had the support.

But where were the rest of you?

Where were the white people who went to high school with me and with other Black teenagers, teenagers who slept in our beds with us and ate s'mores with us, who made posters with us and dissected frogs with us?

They were (are) our friends. They matter.

Where were the other white parents? The parents of the kids in my teenager's class, the parents who have Black kids in their homes on Friday nights, sleeping on their living room floors watching Netflix and eating popcorn?

These kids, they matter.

Where were our politicians? I didn't see any of you, the people who were elected to serve us, who say you are there for all of us, for every last citizen…even the Black ones.

Your constituents, they matter.

I want to say that I missed you because you were masked. Maybe a few of you I did.

But I looked out over a sea of people, and I was able to find the ones who mattered.

I didn't find you.

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