Resilient

13The Murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and BLM

We have taken the baton.

—Opal Tometi

They say that we become desensitized after a while. I don't know if that's true.

A few weeks before George Floyd was murdered, I remember talking to a senior writer at Essence magazine. I had just announced our Series A raise and we were doing an interview. I remember telling her that because of COVID-19 and everything that was happening I didn't feel excited about the raise. I'm an empath. I feel the pain of others deeply. I'm not happy when others aren't winning. I was reading emails in my founder groups from founders who had to lay off their entire staff, shutting their doors. She softly reminded me that it was still important to find joy in wins. I took heed of that advice, not knowing that just a few weeks later we would witness the murder of a 46-year-old Black man in Minneapolis. What we saw next would become our generation's version of a civil rights movement, an era I believe that the history books will describe as the Black Lives Matter movement.

When you are running a company and you have not one but two historic events that happen in a short period of time, something neither you nor anyone else has ever experienced, you rack your brain on what to do next.

I've found that when you don't know how to show up, you always show up as yourself.

The events that would play out in the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, who the world would also find out about, ...