Who Is the Human in This Place?

Five years after George Floyd, I’m still asking: What does it mean to be human—and can literature help us figure it out?

Five years ago, George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin. That is fact.

You’re probably thinking that I am a day late. The anniversary was on the 25th and today is not the 25th. I did not miss the anniversary, I just didn’t know how to acknowledge it.

In the years since this event, my professional work has been focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion in curriculum and access to education. I’ve created programs, guided other professors in this effort, been part of college system-wide reforms, and even earned my instructional design certificate with that in mind.

In my writing life, I have focused on activism—writing the truth of existence, being a mirror and a filter. Poetry is the language of emotion and I have used that tool, and continue to do so, to the best of my ability.

So, it was difficult to reconcile the work I have done professionally as a writing professor and in literary circles as a writer with the current state of affairs. Just the acronym DEI rallies hatred, sneers, and misinformation. It is so tempting to look around and say that our accomplishments don’t mean much, that the needle toward equality is broken beyond repair. How easy it is to be so pessimistic. Instead, I want to ask a question of literature and my writing practice, as I so often do in times of turmoil: What now? What role does literature play in this uncertain aftermath?

In the Direct Aftermath

Black squares for profile pictures littered social media spaces. Everyone turned toward reading books by top scholars in history, sociology, African American studies, and others to learn “how we got here” and “what we could do to move forward.” It was the age of performative allyship—but the important part is that there were conversations.

It was at that time, after 2020, that DEI offices opened (or expanded) in corporate America. Those three words opened up conversations while a nation, still masking from a pandemic, attempted to accelerate what takes generations to accomplish—the kind of equality that is more akin to equity.

I had been a professor four years when all this happened. I was angry that my fellow Houstonian George Floyd was no longer with us, but I was angrier that it took his death—and the deaths of so many other Black men and women—to FINALLY acknowledge that something was inherently wrong.

I knew something was wrong the day my own father was slammed into the ground in front of our home by a sheriff’s deputy. My mother rushed out of the house and yelled that he had a heart condition. The reason? He didn’t stop in the street but pulled into the house. The deputy had attempted to pull my dad over in front of the house, but he had pulled into the driveway as he was already in the middle of that action. I remember that day—when the deputy’s knee was shoved into my father’s back.

Feeling safe with an officer is difficult for me. It’s difficult for many of us. I am lucky that I have some friends who have become officers. I have talked to officers in my capacity as a journalist. My opinion has changed, but I am still always careful.

Literature as an Anchor

So what now? Five years later, with all that history and pain inside me, what role can literature possibly play?

Literature not only gives us a new reality but a safe space to investigate our own. It’s the sandbox of possibilities without the annoyance of grainy sand in your shoes. It is in this space where answers can be attempted, questions can be asked, scenarios played out to the end. This reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite writers, Clarice Lispector, in her book Hour of the Star:

“So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.”

And it is in this unknown that we can begin to find an answer, begin to have conversations, begin to crack open the mystery of humanity. Begin. That’s the important word here. It is through literature that we begin. In comic book speak, literature is our origin story. It defines our heroes and heroines, it identifies our villains, it shows our motivations and goals, and highlights our conflicts—especially if we don’t know them yet.

And in literature, we ask the hard questions, like this one which is also from Lispector:

“Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”

Are we monsters? Are we human? What is humanity defined as, outside of biological definitions? This is what literature does.

Literature also erects monuments like Lucille Clifton did for James Byrd in “jasper texas 1998.”

In her poem, she takes the persona of the body parts of James Byrd, a Black man who was dragged to death, tied to the back of a pickup truck by a group of white men in Jasper, Texas (East Texas). Jasper is near Vidor, Texas, a known place where if you are Black, you don’t go. Ever. I was 11 years old when I learned that, and when I first heard James Byrd’s name.

In this poem, she poses several questions. One of the most impactful was:

“who is the human in this place, the thing that is dragged or the dragger?”

Does being human mean that some of us are monsters?

Eudora Welty wrote “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” in 1963 after the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. She wrote it in anger and in one day. She felt she knew the mind of a person who would kill Evers in the carport as his family was inside their house. Welty nailed the Byron De La Beckwith voice without knowing who he was; she understood the thinking so well. In her sandbox, she channeled the kind of mind that would kill a man coming out of his car to his family. This story was published in The New Yorker.

Written in first person, Welty enters the mind of a killer. It was the face, on television, that was the impetus of the assassination. The mere existence of a person was enough to orchestrate their ending. She writes:

“I reckon that’s how I give myself the idea.

I says, I could find right exactly where in Thermopylae that n*** living that’s asking for equal time. And without a bit of trouble to me.”*

The story builds on the motif of heat—the hot night, the heat of the rifle, the heat on him after the death of the fictional Roland Summers, whose name also adds to the motif. However, the story is also one series of questions—23 exactly—including the title. The most potent questions come after the unnamed narrator kills Summers:

“I stepped to the edge of his light there, where he’s laying flat. I says, ‘Roland? There was one way left, for me to be ahead of you and stay ahead of you, by Dad, and I just taken it. Now I’m alive and you ain’t. We ain’t never now, never going to be equals and you know why? One of us is dead. What about that, Roland?’ I said. ‘Well, you seen to it, didn’t you?’”

Is this humanity or is this monstrosity? Or does one exist because the other does?

Conversations

Five years after George Floyd, I’m still asking the same questions I was at 11. Who is the human in this place? Is humanity monstrous? And what do we do when we’re not sure of the answer?

This is what I thought we were discussing in the aftermath of 2020. This is what I thought the real discussion around DEI was. But maybe I wasn’t asking the same questions everyone else was. Or maybe I knew the answers and didn’t—or couldn’t—accept them.

My sandbox is the page and the classroom. The stories my students read are the kind that have them asking bigger and deeper questions. The overall question for the semester—what does it mean to be human on the planet—is what guides us. That’s it. That’s the question they have to ask and answer by the end of the semester. Whether they answer it or not is up to them, but they need to at least think: what is humanity at its core?

This is why I write. I’m trying to answer that question myself. I’m lingering at the thought of my own humanity and the construction of it. What do I want it to be? Most importantly, what is my human legacy? These stories, these poems, this Substack are what I am leaving behind to show that I was here, I felt and thought deeply, I experienced life, and I too was human. These artifacts help define it.

So literature helps us begin—the conversation, the thoughts, the action.

And thus we start with literature.

A story begins.

A stage is set.

The lights dim.

And we start.