Different day, same old shit.
Another black man murdered by a police officer. Shot him in the back, twice, as the victim was running away from a possible misdemeanor incident (fell asleep drunk in a parked car). The incident was videotaped, and it is apparent that the officer was not mortally threatened but, simply, lost his temper. He could have let the perp run away; the cops already had his car. Another senseless tragedy, another husband and father cruelly gunned down. Another community enraged with corresponding protests and riots.
The American public, regardless of race, is fed up with this stuff.
Until law enforcement is taken to task for wanton excessive force, the problem will continue. Our cops need to understand that their job is to “serve and protect”, not administer punishment. And they need to help society weed out the troublemakers among their militaristic fraternity. Until that occurs, they are all complicit.
This type of behavior by law enforcement has been going on all over the Nation for 150 years. All minorities have seen their civil rights violated repeatedly while White folks enjoy the protection and peace of mind that taxpaying citizens deserve and pay for. We Caucasians have pretended that all is well, that bad guys deserve street justice, and that complaints about police conduct are exaggerated by crooked defense attorneys.
We’ve been lying to ourselves for generations, looking the other way, and buying into the myth that minorities are…not quite as human as we are. It’s a convenient, subtle racism that infests every nook and cranny of American society. The broken law enforcement and criminal justice systems are but a couple of manifestation of that ugly truth. We are all complicit in this travesty…for not paying attention, for swallowing bullshit fed to us by dishonest politicians, and inventing excuses.
In the past few weeks, in the aftermath of the several brutal incidences of white-on-black violence that have shocked the Nation, I have heard a number of people try to rationalize the bad behavior of the police by prefacing their pro forma indignation over the tragedies by adding…”but George Floyd was a bad guy”, or something to that effect. In other words, something in his past made him a damaged human being…so “maybe he deserved being choked to death, just sayin’”.
A good friend of Charlie and I made some lame excuse like that yesterday when the subject of the nationwide protests came up in conversation. Both of us blanched at the voiced rationalization, realizing at once that we were in the presence of another Caucasian dolt who has drunk the Kool Aid that the “law and order” types and police unions have been serving up for decades. Yeah, we all fell for it (us White guys), gobbling up the “Dirty Harry” philosophy of policing…that we civilians just don’t understand what’s going on out on the streets, and need to leave it to the “experts”. We could sleep well at night, knowing that the Thin Blue Line had our backs.
All of that was, of course, before cellphones with cameras.
Now it is all too common to see, up close and personal, what it means to be a Black man in America at the mercy of law enforcement. It is not a pretty sight, it is wrong, and it is un-American.
I’m ashamed. We can, and must, do better as a society. I must do better.
Law enforcement misdeeds are the primary focus right now, but other important aspects of systemic racism are also being lifted up for public inspection by the protestors, journalists, and politicians. As it turns out, racism has been in evidence, “in plain sight”, for quite a while.
I have spoken on this subject in previous blogs, i.e. “The Lost Cause” of the Confederacy. It astounds me how effective this political propaganda campaign was in shaping public attitudes after the Civil War. Traitors became heroes, victims became demons, and outlawed slavery morphed into Jim Crow racism…the South lost the battle but, somehow, won the war. It is hard to understand how Americans fell for this re-invention of history. Yet, they allowed it to occur.
Anyway, the recent furor is forcing Americans to look carefully at institutional racism. For example, there are hundreds of statues in public places throughout America glorifying Confederate officials and military officers. The descendants of once-enslaved people must walk by those civic memorials every day. What kind of message is that statue sending those citizens? That there was something honorable about fighting to retain slavery? That seems to be the not-so-subtle message…in-your-face racism, courtesy of the “Lost Cause” folks, with seal of approval by your local government officials.
Those statues are now coming down all over America, and not just in Southern towns and cities. It will be interesting to see how long similar statues survive in the Capitol rotunda in Washington D.C. If you’ve ever been there, you will recall that the traitor, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, is memorialized there. Why? Whose idiotic idea was that? Who approved it?
Similarly, numerous military bases in the southern states are named after Confederate military officers. These supposed “heroes” took up arms against the Federal government that they had sworn to protect and defend. Why would that government later honor them by naming a United States military installation in their honor? It beats me.
There is a groundswell of resentment against racism and the ol’ Confederacy right now. Demands have been made to re-name those bases. Congress seems to be of a like mind, but President Trump, who delights in always going against the tide of popular opinion, has been adamant in opposition.
Why? Because his political base is in the Southern states…who like to cling to old fashioned ideas like “The Lost Cause”. It wasn’t that long ago when our President defended White Supremacists as “good people”. (That sounds a lot like the 99 percent of cops that are good, but watch one of their fellow officers, the 1 percenter, choke a citizen to death and say and do nothing to stop it.)
Signs of the times: NASCAR, the stock car racing circuit, which is super popular in the South, agreed this week to ban the display of Confederate flags at its events.
Also, HBO Max screenings of “Gone With The Wind”, the 1939 classic Civil War classic, will henceforth be preceded with a blip adding historical context of the “Lost Cause” campaign. Also, Johnson and Johnson, the makers of Band Aids, announced that their bandages will now come in a range of colors, rather than just Caucasian beige.
Yes, these are all small things, but they’re a start at unwinding the tangle of racism that envelops our society.
Are you listening, President Trump?
Next on the civil rights’ activist agenda: G.O.P. voter suppression efforts in the 2020 election.
Republican operatives have made a sport of disenfranchising Black voters in recent elections. Gerrymanders, reducing polling places, making registration harder, limiting voting hours, making poor people drive 30 miles to their polling place, locating polling places in police stations, and attempting to limit absentee voting are but a few of the insidious tools. Tape recordings have documented G.O.P. agents bragging and laughing about their treachery. Nothing is more racist than minimizing African American influence in elections. It is common practice in the South and in some Northern states, as well.
As a result of the recent societal upheaval, mayhem, and soul-searching, there will be a microscope focused on the 2020 election process. This isn’t deterring President Trump, who is keeping up a steady drumbeat against absentee voting in 2020; he is determined to minimize voting, which is odd for a leader of a democratic nation…isn’t it?
One important benefit of the current maelstrom is that the young people of America seem to be energized, much like our generation was during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement back in the day.
In 2016, almost 42 percent of our voting-eligible population did not vote. That is, about 100 million citizens didn’t vote for either Trump or Clinton, who each tallied around 60 million votes. Roughly one-third of those non-voters were younger than 30 years of age, and about 40 percent (including some of those young folks) were minorities.
If a significant portion of that non-voting cohort enters the 2020 fray, there could be a massive change in the electoral outcome from 2016.
Let’s pretend that the folks who liked/disliked Trump or Clinton stays the same, and the portion of the non-voters who disliked both remains the same, it would only take a few million additional “energized” young angry White activists and minority (previously non-) voters to swing results in five or six states.
Both the Senate and House, plus the Presidency, could go Democratic.
If any substantial progress is going to be made on racial equality and re-imagining our law enforcement and criminal justice systems, it is unlikely to happen under the leadership of Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
I think that those angry, previously non-participating eligible voters are saying, “Enough already”.
We will see in November.
(BTW, President Trump is going to start doing his big campaign rallies beginning this weekend. Attendees will be required to sign liability releases that protect the Trump campaign from any lawsuits that might otherwise be brought in the event that an attendee catches Covid-19 while yelling, screaming, and jostling with the other tens of thousands of attendees…who won’t be wearing face masks in deference to their Supreme Leader.)
