Tierra Ruffin-Pratt Hopes This Time Is Different

When trying to understand how communities of color are processing the killing of George Floyd by police and all that’s followed, it is important to remember that they’ve seen this play out countless times.

For Tierra Ruffin-Pratt, the killing of George Floyd and the killing of her cousin, all that came in between and before and the fears of what’s ahead run together.

“For me it’s just the same feeling as when my cousin was killed by the police a little over seven years ago,” Ruffin-Pratt told reporters this week on a conference call. “All the same memories are coming back up so it’s been an emotional week for me and my family.”

That means difficult memories to process. Ruffin-Pratt was tired, but she wasn’t stopping. Her fight continues even as the ebb and flow of how our media consumption takes place shifts focus away from racial violence, only to be snapped back to it when another killing draws attention amid the many that don’t.

What’s unresolved is how the WNBA, her employer, will handle a renewed focus on this. As Ruffin-Pratt pointed out, we don’t really know how the league would respond in 2020 — coronavirus has delayed the start of the campaign.

But Ruffin-Pratt does remember 2016, when she helped lead the effort to put a public spotlight on a pair of killings — that time, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. The history always repeats. Ruffin-Pratt is dedicated to stopping the cycle. The league fined players who stood up, then rescinded those fines — a cycle broken, voices instead allowed to be heard. The business of daily life in the WNBA changed, Ruffin-Pratt hopes, permanently. But she doesn’t know for sure.

“We’re not playing right now so we don’t know what would have happened if the same thing came up, and we were in season and playing that we wanted to wear t-shirts or not stand for the anthem or whatever the case may be,” Ruffin-Pratt said. “We don’t know. All we know is they put out quotes, saying they’re standing with us and, I think, as time goes on, we’ll see if it’s just those one or two posts that they put out. Does it end there, or what goes on after?”

What is after? How to define an endpoint for what feels like a repeating nightmare on loop? For media, Ruffin-Pratt doesn’t want to see a declared end, a time when the camera shuts off and the racism that thrives in darkness is allowed to resume unimpeded.

“It just has to be continuous care, and when the protesting stops, it has to be a continual conversation. Athletes speaking out when they’re doing media and press, anything, but the conversation has to keep going.”

That conversation runs together, too, across racial lines with her teammates in DC in 2016 or in Los Angeles now, her family and daily interactions with Nneka Ogwumike all part of the same momentum, carrying the society in need of change forward toward something unknown — but different, is the hope. Change is the variable that matters when the status quo has killed so many.

“Everybody’s fighting,” Ruffin-Pratt said. “Everybody across the country’s fighting. So I think that’s what’s most important. Just not letting it end like still to this day we get messages and different things about my cousin and people still support the movement, so I think that’s one thing that just never letting it end. Never letting one person’s name die when they die.”

And for those of us who aren’t in communities of color, Ruffin-Pratt has a simple request.

“All we can ask is that you change yourself,” she said. “You change the generations that are coming behind you. You talk to your kids, because it’s a learned behavior. Racism is learned. You’re not born that way. So, all we can ask is you for white people to change themselves, change their family, change the generations coming after them.”