I Take It Personally. Black Lives Matter. Everywhere.

These comments were made by Donessa Colley during a panel discussion, “Unspoken Truths:  A Public Forum on the Murder of George Floyd, Race Relations and the Journey Towards Equity,” held on June 23 and co-sponsored by 13 community and news organizations in Greater Hartford.  A video of the entire discussion is available online.  Ms. Colley’s comments, transcribed below, begin at 1:06 of the recording.

By Donessa Colley

I have a very personal response to COVID-19.  I lost my dad on March 27.  His official cause of death was respiratory failure.  This is still hard for me to talk about.  His birthday was last week, and last weekend was just Father’s Day. 

My dad died because he couldn’t breathe.  And George Floyd died because he could not breathe.  And it doesn’t matter whether it was from a police officer’s inadequacy or a doctor’s inadequacy, Black lives were lost at a disproportionate rate because the people we depend on for help do not give it to us the same way they give it to others. 

I study health and human biology in the social context – I focus on race and immigrant status – because I’m the daughter of two immigrants from Jamaica. My dad came here with eight dollars in his pocket, and he worked his butt off to get his daughter to go to an Ivy League school.  He had no college education, no high school diploma, and for the same hospital where I was born to be the place where he died, because doctors weren’t believing him until my mom came in yelling that her husband couldn’t breathe, and demand that he needed more oxygen, and for me not to be able to be there as a pre-medical student to advocate for him, due to COVID-19 restrictions… This protesting is a no-brainer for me, because people are dying every day, every minute.

When George Floyd died, my dad died all over again.

For me to sit here in my home and think about the Black Lives Matter movement and what’s going on… it’s the same thing, it’s the same movement.  Black lives matter everywhere – in the hospital, in the car, on the highway, on the road – everywhere!

“We’re dying because we can’t breathe because we’re being stifled by a system that doesn’t care about us. ”

Every night, before I go to bed I wonder if the doctor didn’t believe him because he was Black.  I wonder if his diabetes that went undiagnosed for many years because he was Black was another factor.  I wonder if his hypertension, which we are much more likely to face as Black people, was a contributing factor that made it too much… I don’t know.

My dad came here for better health care, for a better life, for better opportunities, and the very country that he picked up everything for, and left everything behind for, is the country that killed him.  I maintain that to this day. That’s how I feel.  It’s three months out, I don’t know how I’m going to feel in three years, but that’s how I feel right now. 

We don’t get to pick and choose whose life we protect and when we are going to be careful and who we’re going to care for.  These protests happening now are a matter of lives being lost tomorrow, yesterday, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, lives that are going to continue to be lost until we do something.   

The amount of Black people dying because they can’t breathe under the knees of police officers and in hospital beds as well – it doesn’t matter where.  We’re dying because we can’t breathe because we’re being stifled by a system that doesn’t care about us.      

That’s the fact of the matter.  There’s no better way to put it. 

I sit here as a pre-medical student, I tell you I believe in bio-medicine, I can tell you I want to go to medical school, I can tell you I want to be a doctor, and I can also tell you that there are immense, immense issues in our health care system I’m going to have to face and I’m going to have to reconcile with as a doctor. 

But I can also tell you that by marching, by getting out there, by spreading the word, you’re not only marching for George Floyd, you’re marching for my dad, you’re marching for years and years, centuries of Black people who did not get the chance to take another breath, because somebody else decided that their life didn’t matter enough because of the color of their skin.    

Donessa Colley is a rising junior at Brown University, where she studies health and human biology with a focus on the social context of health and disease.  She has spent two years as an executive leader of the Brown University Black Student Union and also serves as a women’s peer counselor.  She was born and raised in Connecticut, where she was a member of Hartford Youth Scholars and attended Choate Rosemary Hall.  Donessa’s father, Phillip Colley, died on March 27 at age 62.