June 2020: The Summer of George

 On May 25, 2020 transplanted Houstonian George Floyd was in a store in his adopted city of Minneapolis, Minnesota attempting to make a purchase.  Store personnel believed the bill with which he attempted to pay to be counterfeit and called police who arrived shortly thereafter.
     Mr. Floyd was taken into custody by uniformed officers on the scene and  security video from multiple angles show him to be complying with the arresting officers. For reasons yet determined officer Derek Chauvin put an already handcuffed Floyd on the ground and placed his knee on his neck until George was begging for mercy and his life but to no avail. It fell on deaf ears and Floyd died from the officer cutting off the flow of blood to his brain and his air supply.

        When video footage of the incident in which onlookers were begging Chauvin to remove his foot from the helpless man's neck went public Chauvin and the other officers present were immediately fired. Days later he was indicted for 3rd degree murder.  Protests and riots ensued in some cases concurrently. While watching the events unfold some only saw protesters, others only rioters. People saw that which they chose to see. They saw that which made them the most comfortable.
       I saw the footage and released a heavy sign.  I've seen this happen so many times it's as if I'm in the Bill Murray film "Groundhog Day" and I can describe every event forthcoming because it's happened so many times before.

1. Video is released. Many are outraged, but others will imply that we didn't see what happened BEFORE the cameras started rolling.

2. There will be protests in the streets and a few imbeciles will riot leaving some with a political agenda to try to imply that protesters were violent thugs bent on destruction and not civil rights.

3. The officer will face a grand jury and may or may not go to trial.

4. There will be discussions of race and inequality which will fizzle out as soon as there's a huge news story like a mass shooting or a celebrity wedding or baby.

5. The officers trial will result in either an acquittal, mistrial or hung jury, but in the event that there IS a conviction there will be a lengthy appeal, but during that appeal the officer will be out on bond. After years of appeals a sympathetic judge will uphold the officer's conviction, but commute it to however long the appellate process took. By such time either the indignation from the family of the person murdered will have subsided, or  the public would have lost interest.

6. Another black man is killed by a cop, security guard, neighborhood watch captain or citizen trying to make a citizens arrest and it starts all over again.

President Trump's response to the protest has been to use tear gas on peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park across from the presidential residence that is the Whitehouse and to tell the nation that our cities need to be "dominated" by the military in a sad attempt at martial law.  In other words IF police brutality IS real we can deal with it later, in the interim lets get on the streets and be brutal and excessive. Simply put the brutal police treatment will cease when the protests of brutal police treatment ceases. OR as the old naval joke said: "The floggings shall continue until morale improves."


Author James Baldwin once said in his essay "The Fire Next Time": “It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.” 

I do not believe that black America HATES white America. I believe that there exists an undercurrent of fear and misgivings between us that has resulted in ongoing tension that threatens to suck us into an undertow that could kill us both.

I can't  and don't pretend to speak for black America. Like any group of people we're not a monolith. Our opinions are as varied as the shades of brown in which we come.   The civil rights movement was a century long battle to remove Jim Crow laws enacted in the American south by embittered Confederate veterans after they LOST the civil war.   The purpose of Jim Crow was to prove to the black man that he didn't have to BE a slave legally in order to be the lowest run in society.  Jim Crow laws were entirely economic. Wealthy southern whites allowed them as a means of pacifying their poor brethren. Convince a poor man that another poor man is the source of all of his problems and the odds of both poor men uniting to topple you decreases.
          For a century Jim Crow laws  gave poor southern whites the belief that they were somehow better than blacks by allowing them to deny them access to housing, education and even the right to use a public restroom. While that happened those same dirt poor people never questioned why wealthy whites kept them from country clubs, schools and living in certain areas.  Some didn't question it, others simply were satisfied in knowing that they weren't the lowest on America's totem pole.
     
        The problem with civil rights legislation passing in the 60s and 70s is that many non persons of color don't see it as the PAUSE of rights given in 1865 being removed, but rather that a problem was solved. They believe that racism vanished over night with the passage of a few laws. Those same people probably believe that the entire civil rights movement was about being able to sit in the front of a bus.
       I've never believed in entitlements. When I was eight I asked my dad for an "allowance" and rather than giving me one, he taught me to do paint and dry wall and paid me for working with him.
As a black man in America I've never wanted a "check from the government", "stamps" for food and sure as hell didn't want any damned free cheese.  All I ever wanted and felt I was entitled to was a chance.  I'd like to think that if I apply for a job my qualifications will be viewed as anyone elses.
      I want a justice system which can look at me and another defendant accused of the SAME crime and which treats us the same way and DOESN'T give me a harsher sentence based on the hue of my skin.

        While I love my country I would be remiss if I didn't say that she has racist roots. We are a nation built on land stolen from its indigenous people, who then created an industry of kidnapping the indigenous people of another continent to work on that stolen land. A war was fought over the ability to treat the descendants of those captive people in that state and the right to move them onto NEW lands stolen from the indigenous people.  While claiming to be the land of the free, my country has killed Indians, enslaved and killed Africans then allowed the recreational killing of the descendants of Africans, Mexicans and Asians for the amusement of jeering mobs.

     Are we a racist country today? I don't think we are, but the problem is America is NOT comfortable with it's racist past. My simply MENTIONING the aforementioned will anger many. I'll be accused of being a Politically Correct Thug who is revising history ignoring the prism that is history. I'll be asked to consider the time in which the creators of our country lived. Invariably I'll ask those same people to join me in the 21st century.
    Many non persons of color will defensively say of Indian genocide, slavery, the Chinese Exclusion Act and deportation of people of Mexican descent BORN in the United States.  "I didn't do it! Why do you keep bringing it up!?"  Odd that the same people may even proudly wave one of the flags of the Confederacy and call it "history" and a source of pride. Who decides what's "pride" and what's "hurtful?"  America has never owned up to her racist past or the inequities embedded in daily life to that end were we to think of it as a football game, the issue of racism has been punted on 4th down after 4th down with the assumption that the next possession will be when it's dealt with.  The problem is it's late in the game and we have no points on the board.
     Entire groups of Americans are marginalized by racism in different forms every day and others either pretend it doesn't exist because they don't face it, allow something in their minds to pretend that they are the true victims OF it, or act as if it lives in a bygone America in which their grandparents lived.  Sadly America's denial of rights to persons of color was replaced by a simple denial about racism and  unfortunately each time we evade the topic and pretend that there is nothing to discuss we ensure that some future generation will be discussing this same topic generations from now.

    In the meanwhile as his summer continues, George Floyd gets to join Travon Martin, Tamir Rice, Emmett Till and scores of black men whose names we'll never know whose only "crime" was being black in America and a victim of someone elses sad, preconceived idea of whom they were.  I can only hope that there will be no future martyr whose name shall become synonymous  with America's grave sin of differentiating degrees of Americanism, but I know it would be foolish to believe it's even remotely possible.  Our history has proven me wrong on too any occasions.