Want to ensure Black Lives Matter? Vote in November
A white man dials into a radio station, a local NPR affiliate.
He’s eager to answer the host’s query, one that’s being dissected across America: What’s different this time, with the death of yet another black man in what should have been a relatively minor encounter with police?
“It looked like a lynching,” the man said of the inhumanity displayed in the video footage of George Floyd gasping for his last breath, a Minneapolis policeman’s knee on his neck. “The cell phone invited me to a tree that I didn’t want to visit.”
Guess what, buddy, African Americans never wanted to visit it either.
But America is eager to move on, to avert its gaze from what’s uncomfortable. The country’s tiring, as it always does, of protest, of people marching after Floyd’s death.
Businesses want to reopen, their profits zapped first through closure due to the coronavirus and then by the massive protests that swept the nation.
Not surprisingly, talk of “healing” is increasingly heard. The nation lingers in this moment, but it won’t be here long. It never stays long.
But America, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Another task must be completed first. And it’s central to accomplishing the dramatic law enforcement reforms protesters are calling for: less use-offorce, more accountability, fewer militarized Robocops, more cops allowed to truly protect and serve their community.
The task? To cast a vote in November.
Four years ago, a racist walked into The
White House. He must be removed in November by a landslide. America must deny Donald Trump a second term, leaving no doubt about the direction that we desire as a nation.
The president, whether people realize it or not, controls much of whether demands for change result in substantial reform.
But Trump has exhibited no interest in understanding how criminal justice has historically been weighted toward discrimination. In fact, he seems to lean heavily on racist rhetoric when sharing his views on the protesting.
Trump, in recent days, has promoted the use of the National Guard to squash dissent of protesters, and doubling down in dictator terms, calling for an active military to fight its own citizenry.
Trump glorifies police brutality, tweeting, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a racist catcall lifted from the civil rights era, a period when sheriffs and chiefs of police knew they could act with impunity against African Americans.
People tend to view policing as a local issue.
But under the whims of Trump, the Justice Department has shifted away from a key function — enforcing consent decrees with troubled police departments, ones that have undergone deep dive assessments by the civil rights division of the DO J.
Such reports often answer one question being asked now about Floyd’s death. Why did the other officers calmly stand by while he died?
Assessments can unravel embedded attitudes, incentives, rationalizations and policies that tend to build in any organization over time, causing great inequities and violations even when most of the players desire a more just way.
Trump lacks the intelligence required to understand such complexity.
The call “No Justice, No Peace” beckons, and rest assured it never recedes for long.
If you truly believe Black Lives Matter, you’ll be willing to remove the greatest impediment to their safety and security in America — Donald J. Trump must not have a second term.