Hello, all.
No one has to tell us the soul of our country is in anguish right now. An unprovoked murder on the streets of Minneapolis has ignited a long overdue reckoning, but as I write the collateral damage continues to mount. And here I’m not just talking about property, protests or even the sight of a sitting president waving the Bible as though it were a flaming sword.
This week’s blog comes from an article I wrote for The Progressive Populist, one of the truly strong independent papers from the American heartland. The idea is to raise questions about expecting law enforcement to resolve institutional racism. To keep at bay the inconvenient truth America is yet to have deep conversations, let alone deep atonement.
So as you read the article, feel free to agree, disagree or make note of my blindspots. As our leaders in Boston counsel us, we’re not going to get everything right.
Either way, stay engaged and open as deep truths surface from streets across the nation. Let this be the moment we all say, no more:
Sixteen nineteen. That’s the year most often cited as the beginning of systemic racism in the western hemisphere – a date that’s fodder for academic debate given enslaved Africans disembarked in Bermuda some two years earlier.
What’s not up for discussion are the searing eight minutes and forty-six seconds it took for Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, to kill George Floyd. It’s a number that should live in the infamy of lethal policing against Americans of color.
Blatantly criminal as this latest example of police brutality has shown itself to be, there’s no guarantee the act would’ve been seen in it’s grim fullness were it not for Darnella Frazier, the seventeen-year-old that used a phone camera to record what she was seeing. Such is the state of trust between police and the policed.
But accountable as Chauvin and his three onlooking fellow officers surely are, their actions (and non-reactions) are further examples of how law enforcement agencies are still asked to do the dirty bidding of maintaining white privilege.
Consider the oppression baked into the nascent republic and applied first to indigenous Americans via the twin doctrines of discovery and manifest destiny – doctrines the privileged created over time, secure in the thought law officers would impose and enforce them.
This model was early on transferred to African and Black Americans, justifying across white supremacy culture their particular suffering, torture and death. It’s a model yet in force as law enforcement members are triangulated by legal codes written in the main by whites, buttressed by the street-level racism those codes so often evoke.
If this reads like a white defense of a primarily white policing entity, the intent is quite the opposite: police criminality is a distinct, potentially deadly force for racial evil, disproportionality applied to communities of color in what even some liberals dare call a “post-racial” society. A single law official that trucks with racism is one too many.
But it should be patently obvious that donning a uniform in 2020 America may sooner or later place that law officer squarely between what’s morally right, and what’s delineated protocol in a deeply flawed system.
There can be no doubt the killing of George Floyd at the knee of an officer sworn to protect and serve has wrought a moment in time. Disparities in justice, economics and agency are now unavoidable, but what comes next is far from clear.
All we know is the protests will eventually end, but there can be no more societal dereliction of duty in the work of anti-racism and reconciliation. No more shirking a heavy burden.