So many of you wrote to us in response to our monthly newsletter with deep concern for black lives in our community and around the country. The video of George Floyd's death is a stark departure from the America some of us we thought we knew, and many of you wrote looking for steps we could take to raise our voices and act up and raise our voices in our own backyard. A groundswell of grassroots activity gave way to several successful actions this week, and we wanted to alert you to a few more.
If you choose to attend, please take great care to practice social distancing and cover your face and nose. The onslaught of crises this spring has already taken so many lives, and it is our responsibility to take every precaution necessary to take care of each other and heal, in spite of our shared grief.
Hyannis; Friday, June 5, 2020 @ 2pm. Event to begin at Sturgis Public Charter School East Campus. Please see this link to RSVP and view full details.
Orleans; Friday, June 5, 2020 @ 3pm. Event to begin at Snows Library Orleans. Please see this link to RSVP and view full details.
Aquinnah; Friday, June 5, 2020 @ 7pm. Event to begin at Aquinnah Circle.
Harwich; Saturday, June 6, 2020 @ 2pm. Event to begin at Brooks Park (Main St. at Oak St.). Parade to follow. Please see this link to RSVP and view full details.
Brewster; Saturday, June 6 @ 2pm. Event to begin at Brewster Town hall.
Provincetown; Saturday, June 6, 2020 @ 12pm. Event to begin at the Provincetown town hall. This event is a silent vigil.
Hyannis; Sunday, June 7, 2020 @ 2pm. March to begin at the Cape Cod Conference and Resort Center and end at the Village Green in Hyannis.
We did our very best to lift up as many Cape & Islands events as we could. If you are aware of others that we missed, please contact [email protected].
For those of us who are white, our job is to accept nothing less than a paradigm shift in policing in every community, but our job is also not to confine the change we demand to law enforcement. Indeed every institution in our society — our schools, our housing, our financial institutions, our government — is a product of white privilege and white silence.
And for those of us who, like me, are LGBTQ, our job — especially white queer people — is to think long and hard about how riots and ACT-ing UP made possible the lives we lead today, and yet those same acts of protest and civil disobedience for 400 years have not yielded the same equity for our black and brown sisters and brothers.
Our job is to listen, to do the hard uncomfortable work of anti-racism, here now and always until white nationalism and white supremacy are banished to the dustbin of history.
In solidarity,
