Letter to the Editor: Reparations for George Floyd should build new schools

I am white and 68 years old. I am a nurse. This is what I know.

George Floyd lies face down with a knee pressing into his neck. It’s the knee of a white law enforcement officer abusing his badge.

In my mind I kneel at Mr. Floyds’ shoulder. Powerless to lift that knee of oppression from his neck, I focus instead on what he is saying just before he expires.

“Please, I can’t breathe. Everything hurts.”

As a nursing student in my hometown of Philadelphia in 1970, I first worked the men’s wards, populated by men of color, often homeless from skid row. Later I worked the Intensive Care units for cardiac or neuro patients. No men or women of color there. With vivid clarity I recall asking my clinical instructor why aren’t there any black people in here? A shrug and weak, “I guess they are not sick enough.”

And so, it continues for African Americans: health care inequity, police brutality, voter suppression, job discrimination and criminally poor educational opportunities.

This is what I know.

“Thoughts and prayers” are an obscenely tone-deaf response to the anguish of Mr. Floyd’s family. To Mr. Arbery’s family. To Breonna Taylor’s family. And all the others lost to senseless, unnecessary violence in the name of the law.

America has had enough of Congress’ inability to implement meaningful and permanent change. We are, all of us Americans, exhausted by non-existent leadership. We don’t want another committee. We want action.

We need a fifty-state, fifty-school Reparation Fund.

Each state chooses an elementary school that is in dire and urgent need of replacement. Tear them down and fund them.

Black architects, contractors, plumbers, electricians, masons, painters, artists, educators, and religious leaders matter. Let their creativity and ingenuity have expression.

There are resources to spare in our communities where blacks and browns and all colors can join together to make a school rise from the ashes to educate and have equal education.

Susan Turnage
Lanexa