n the middle of a pandemic that is killing inordinate numbers of black people, many have been grieving the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, David McAtee and many others, while living with the realities of Covid-19. That George Floyd lived through coronavirus to then be killed by police who cut off his oxygen is a cruel irony. Yet his death makes it clear that we cannot separate the pandemic from police violence because they are both driven by the same thing – white supremacy. Since the long hot summer of 1967, when more than 150 rebellions ripped across the country, there have been various calls for reform, changes that were supposed to make the lives of black people better. In each instance, those lives have not been improved by these processes and often undelivered promises. Body cameras, non-lethal weapons, increasing the diversity of police forces and the like were all heralded as changing the face of policing. But they all only changed the techniques. Instead of making officers act more responsibly, we know that body cameras can be turned on and off and cops continue to brutalise the public they purportedly serve. Therefore, reforming a clearly broken system will not do much to keep black people from dying in the streets. In the last week or so, people have continued to be brutalised and killed by police while protesting against that very thing – police violence. This pain people are witnessing now occurs in so many facets of black lives, but we don’t see black stories as part of the collective narrative of the US. While the racism that black bodies are made to endure might seem localised, the marginalisation, expulsion and exclusion black people experience have consequences for other communities. The “war on drugs”, launched under Richard Nixon, was escalated in the mid-1980s to address the so-called crack epidemic. In very short order, crack cocaine became linked to “urban” crime. The racialisation of the drug made black people the face of addiction and led to calls for more severe punishment for possession of crack. As a result of moral panics over “crack babies” and other such nonsense, we saw harsher punishment for crack versus powder cocaine possession and calls for mandatory minimum sentences that increased incarceration rates for black people. It was not until the opioid epidemic hit rural and suburban white America that cries to see drug addiction as an “illness” were heeded. Some who saw the ravages of opioid addiction were calling for drug treatment, rather than the prison cell they advocated for others. In short, the drugs that had claimed so many black lives came for white people – with different responses. And yet here we are again. Right now in the US, Senator Rand Paul is obstructing the passage of a bill that would make lynching a federal crime after more than a century of advocacy. The journalist and activist Ida B Wells-Barnett described lynching in 1909 as a “colour line-murder” and, most importantly, “a national crime and requires a national remedy”. She said what too few in Congress appreciate today – the death of black people by legal and extra-legal means is “a blight upon our nation”. More than a century later, black people still cannot get the US government to recognise our pains. The reason George Floyd and so many others are dead is because they are black. And being black in my country is treated, by some police officers and vigilantes alike, as probable cause to harass, detain and kill. Consider black people as canaries in the coal mine. What happens to them in this country matters for everyone. Those who would seek to raise the canard of black on black crime as a riposte to the charges of systemic racism in this country have not been paying attention. And focusing on the deaths of those harmed at the hands of the police ignores the many violences black people experience on a daily basis in the US. Forget the term “micro-aggressions” – let’s call them “macroaggressive”. It’s probably not going to be the Knight Rider at your door, but maybe the other “good” white people who come armed with guns demanding to search your home. Yet black people are made to feel ashamed for saying they have been victims. To be a victim simply means that you have been harmed by the actions of another. Yet black people have been told over and over again that the mere mention of racism is unfair. They’re playing the “race card” or adopting a loser’s mentality. That’s a myth we tell so that black people don’t dwell on the many ways they have been damaged. This is not unique to the US. But acknowledging black pain, our pain, is seen as some sort of weakness or loss of control rather than one of the things we must confront if we are to imagine ways to repair these harms. I don’t want black people to simply survive this moment - I want them to thrive. So far, we have been surviving and it’s not served black people well and it’s certainly not served my country well. The US needs robust, systemic change and we will not get there by pretending we have not been building up to this moment as long as we have been a country. It is a nation founded on theft and it’s payback time. It is always the right time to do the right thing. Niambi Michele Carter is the author of American While Black and is associate professor of political science at Howard University