R.I.P. George Floyd
Dear readers ...
Well, it's been a while, hasn't it? It's been a year-and-a-half since I wrapped up this blog. I wasn't sure if I would ever come back to it. (There certainly has been plenty about which I could have been commenting!) However, the events of nearly three weeks ago and the resulting response has hit me pretty hard and I just need to share this. This is not exhaustive of everything I feel and it's certainly not the be-all-end-all statement on this issue. So, for good or for bad, here is what I have to say.
For starters, I truly hope you are all safe from COVID-19 and healthy. Stay strong and stay safe.
Before I begin, some clarifications. This is not a full-time return to this blog. I am not ready to make a return, so this will be a one-off post. Also, there are those who have spoken and will speak on this far more eloquently than I, but I am adding my voice simply because I feel so strongly about this. This will be more controlled than what I've been saying out loud around the house.
Now, allow me to offer a few examples of personal perspective. First, I was picked on a lot in school, so much so that it really got to me. At the school where I attended grades 4 through 8, back in the days when there were no such things as middle schools, I was picked on every year. My mother told me that, when you're new at a school, kids will pick on you. I replied that I must be new every year because I was being picked on every year. Later, she added I was being picked on because I was a "stocky" kid. (What I wouldn't give to be stocky now.) I offer this first example not to say that being picked on is the same thing as being harassed, unnecessarily imprisoned, or killed. Absolutely not! Not even close! I did not automatically understand racism and how I felt, no matter how bad it felt, paled in comparison to what black people in this country have to live with. I offer it merely to illustrate that I was made aware of being attacked for no good reason and having done nothing wrong at an early age -- it made no sense and it was wrong -- and that first building block stayed with me ever since.
Second, I am male and white, the "best" combination to get along in life. A lot of people would argue that this whole "race stuff" shouldn't concern me. I am less likely to even be pulled over for a traffic stop, aside from being a pretty good driver, or turned down for a job even if i'm qualified. In other words, I should just keep quiet, sit back, and enjoy the ride. I cannot.
Third, I was always someone who said, "All lives matter." (I still believe it.) For me, that included everyone. However, primarily, my own people (white folk) co-opted it as a saying that really meant you (black folk) can wait. Thanks a bunch. (sarcasm intended) For those who may have an issue with "Black lives matter" or simply confused about its meaning, I think this might clear it up:
Finally, I believe the only real race is the human race. End of argument. (Well, that should be the end of the argument, anyway.) Just like there are different breeds of dogs and cats, different species of marine life, and different classifications of mammals, we are all variations of one race. Words for that are ethnicity, ancestry, nationality, and descent. You don't hear anyone saying, for example, someone who is of Irish descent is a different race. do you? This idea that black, white, Asian, etc., are different races is sheer fallacy, a bogus narrative that numbs description and promulgates division.
There is something about the murder of George Floyd that has finally awakened society. What it is specifically, I'm not sure. Some commentators have said it's the graphic nature of the video. That could well be true. I thought the murder of Eric Garner six years ago, which was also filmed in its entirety, would have been the turning point in this country, but it wasn't.
The inclusion of the murders of Breonna Taylor, Freddy Gray, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and Ahmaud Arbery, to name only a few, certainly, and bitterly, compound the frustration. It may well be that the filming of the actual murder itself, close up, has led to George Floyd's murder at the knees of Milwaukee Police becoming our national clarion call to action.
What that action is must be shaped, of course, by the problem itself. You don't need me to go through a history of racism and race relations. If you have paid attention, if you have heard, if you have studied, you know what it is and the stain on this country it has left, and continues to leave. It is not only "America's original sin", it is also "America's ongoing sin".
Just like pressure controlled by a valve, it will blow if the pressure isn't released. One of the ways that building pressure has been expressed has been through marches. It is also one of the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution: "peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances". Some may say to march in protest is wrong, but they couldn't be more wrong.
Allow me to sidetrack for a moment to address those who demonize peaceful protests with looting and destruction, the rioters. Nothing good has ever come from rioting, whether you look at the mid-twentieth century to the early protests over the George Floyd murder, or the Tulsa Massacre ninety-nine years ago, where white rioters decimated an affluent black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, injuring 800 and killing as many as 300 people. Some of today's rioters are from loose-knit groups seeking anarchy or a second Civil War, but whatever the reason, their actions make it far too easy for the ignorant among us to slap on labels of "thugs", "troublemakers", or "all blacks are bad". No solutions have come from labels. However, what I have seen in some protests, with protesters calling out the rioters, has been a welcome and empowering sight.
Maybe if black people were no longer given any reason to protest, the rioters wouldn't have a venue for their own kind of hatred. Just a thought.
Now, what this country has had for centuries is a virus. The coincidence that we are battling the COVID-19 virus at the same time is not lost on this blogger. Both are insidious, both include death, both are easily transmissible. The main differences are: a) one is biologically mutated and the other is perceptually instilled; and b) racism has been around far longer than COVID-19.
This racist virus is so insidious and so permanent, all of those infected with it refuse to accept they have it. It not even a case of being asymptomatic, as with COVID-19, but rather being normative. You will find some victims of this virus saying, "That's just the way it is." They were brought up in a racist environment, became infected, and live their lives accordingly. Others have simply resigned themselves to that state of normative attitudes and behaviors.
This sense of normative infection has been, as we've seen with George Floyd and too many others, a result of not just personal racism but also systemic racism. Look at hiring practices that have been discriminating against black people (as well as other disenfranchised groups). Look at how those in law enforcement have been mistreating black people. Look at how the legal system mishandles black people. Even look at the cell phone videos posted online of white people calling the police because they are near a black person, showing how they think the system is for them and no one else.
Look at the video of George Floyd's murder and how the (now ex-)officer with his knee on Floyd's neck is behaving. He looks right at a camera, without screaming at the person filming to stop and without a scowl on his face, hands in his pockets. He is nonchalant about it. He is doing what he believes to be normative. This kind of behavior -- knees on necks or any kind of murder -- is normative. Whether it is their training (which instills a sense of normalcy) or their current police chief who publicly says the officer(s) behaved according to protocol (which also instills a sense of normalcy), the infection is there.
Add to that a president who tells a gathering of police officers in Long Island, New York, in the summer of 2017 to be rougher with criminals, receiving their enthusiastic applause. It is like recovering from ingesting a poison and then taking very small amounts of it, not enough to kill you, from to time; recovery becomes impossible. The desire to send active military troops on the streets, and to refer to the streets as the "battle space", is akin to taking more than a small amount of a poison.
Another element that adds to recovery being impossible is the police officers' "code of silence" (aka "blue code of silence", "code of honor"). In short, it means to keep quiet if a fellow officer has done something immoral, illegal, or improper in some way. (Personally, I find this similar to the sexual abuses by priests in the Catholic Church.) Legally, it's called "qualified immunity" and it stems from the U.S. Supreme Court recognizing it as legal doctrine back in the late 1960's as a means to avoid frivolous lawsuits against officers and police departments. However, over the course of decades, it has been applied to cases of police brutality or impropriety. Most people saw this as a kind of "Stay Out of Jail Free" card for law enforcement. While this automatic absolution hasn't applied to every single case against officers, the occurrences when law enforcement is actually held accountable are far too infrequent to say the infection has been eradicated.
Your code of silence is your code of violence.
Watching the news coverage of the protests following George Floyd's murder has given me pause and a sense of hopeful surprise. Go back and look at pictures and films of protests over civil rights and the killing of black people in the 1960's. Next, look at the protests from Ferguson and Baltimore. Then, look at the protests now. Notice the glaring difference? The number of white people has increased immensely. The diversity at these protests -- granted, the U.S. is more diverse now than the 1960's -- is amazing and heartwarming. Not to mention that they have continued for nearly three weeks, since George Floyd's murder, and protests are happening not just here, but around the world as well.
After so many times saying to myself that the protests following the unnecessary murder of a black person by police might be the turning point, but then seeing nothing come of it, perhaps these protests are symbolic of the fundamental societal shift that has been too long denied and too long overdue. What does it say about us when the following is a predominant theme:
Many times, at various tragedies, I hear people say things like It's [whatever year] and this is still going on? or When are we going to stop this? or Now is the time! That last one, especially, is partially true, except for how it's typically used as a term of a new beginning. There is no new beginning, at any of these tragedies. The time isn't just now, whenever "now" has been, the time has always been here to make things better. The time has always been here to behave morally. The time has always been here to course correct when we go astray. Any time, all the time, every time, we are called to see ourselves as one race, to come together as one people, to see each other as people, and to not make things great for some, but to make things great for all. The call to all of us has been here from the beginning, has never left us, and never will leave us. We all just have to answer the call. Maybe, just maybe, we are finally doing just that. I truly hope we are.
At the bottom of the George Floyd mural in Minneapolis, it reads, "I can breathe now," following his pleas of "I can't breathe" to his murderers. In the context of time mentioned above, that can refer to not just being free from the pain of being murdered in broad daylight by those who are supposed to protect us, but also of being free of being looked down upon as something less by those who are supposed to protect us. George Floyd's life mattered because black lives matter. We need to achieve black people being free without death being the only means to do so. Fight this virus! Let them breathe!
This virus has gone on too long, and we need to rise together as one to fight this virus. We need to knock down our other methods of division in coming together. In that spirit, I would offer to following:
Remember the words of Jesus: Love one another as I have loved you., and rise up! Remember the words in the book of James: Faith [without] works is dead, and rise up!
We are, and have been, in a pattern of "koyaanisqatsi" or "life out of balance". (The Native American term can also translate to "life of moral corruption and turmoil".) Help us to return to a life of moral goodness and balance, rise up!
Nature focuses on balance and imbalance, not good or evil. Help to bring us back to balance to get us back on the right path for ourselves and the planet we live on, rise up!
Faith may be a religious term, but it is not so exclusively. Have faith in yourselves and your fellow human beings. Come together to do the right thing, and rise up!
We must listen to each other and work with each other, or else this will be yet another squandered opportunity. No ifs, ands, or buts.
We need to heal, but maybe we need to see "heal" as a contraction or sorts, where "heal" is made up of "hear" and "deal". We need to really hear black people, like any subjugated class of people, and not give them merely "ear service". That means not telling them what they think or how they are supposed to perceive things. Then we need to deal with making things right.
Healing the virus in the hearts of those who defend and endorse racism is the far bigger challenge, for just fixing the here-and-now means more of the same is coming later. I don't have the answer on how to do that, aside from saying open your hearts and raise the upcoming generations better. My belief is that's not just the answer, but it can be a big part of the complete answer we need. We need to make what all of this appears to be, the needed shift, a reality for now and for our future.
WE MUST BE THE MEDICINE FOR OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER!
Terry
