Systemic racism on the split-screen
Split-screen images have been flashing in my mind all week.
On one side are current state legislative proposals for affordable housing and zoning reform, most notably the DesegregateCT proposals in SB 1024. On the other side are television images from the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, a painful revisiting of George Floyd’s murder.
Split-screen. Yet, the scenes are not separate. They come together in a disturbing picture: the systemic racism and segregation that’s embedded in American society. Chauvin’s Memorial Day murder of George Floyd last year galvanized a shocked nation that watched in horror as life was slowly squeezed from a fellow human being, a Black man handcuffed and gasping for air, pinned beneath the oppressive knee of a white police officer.
We were all George Floyd in those excruciating, interminable moments during which Chauvin’s knee remained on Floyd’s neck despite the pleas of bystanders begging Chauvin to take his knee away. During those nine minutes and 29 seconds — even longer than the eight minutes and 46 seconds originally counted — we realized the meaning of “Black Lives Matter” because, as a nation, we finally understood how black lives don’t matter.
It was time for a national reckoning.
“The question is not how outraged are we over what happened,” said Congressman Jim Himes (D4), speaking at a June 6 rally for justice outside Greenwich Town Hall, “But what will we do to change the underlying conditions that allowed that to happen?”
During the trial that began this week, we had our first view of a video clip from Chauvin’s body camera as he entered his squad car moments after paramedics took Floyd’s lifeless body — he would soon be pronounced dead — from the scene in an ambulance.
“That’s one person’s opinion,” Chauvin said in response to a bystander angry with him for having kept a knee on Floyd’s neck. “We gotta control this guy ’cause he’s a sizable guy ... and it looks like he’s probably on something.”
Appalling as this statement is considering Chauvin just killed a man who was not violent, had no weapon, and had done nothing other than buy cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 dollar bill, it’s illustrative of the institutional racism that exists, and cries out for the need to reimagine the entire policing function in our society. This is not an isolated incident. It’s systemic.
Last July, in special session, Connecticut’s state legislature passed a police reform bill proposed as a direct result of Floyd’s murder. But that’s not nearly enough.
If we’re serious about uprooting systemic racism, we must commit to the removal of all the structural barriers that maintain both racial and economic segregation. This includes breaking down barriers to equal opportunity whether in education, health care, nutrition, employment, and the housing that impacts everything.
A new coalition, DesegregateCT, founded last June in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, held its inaugural news conference in July advocating for land use reforms that would make Connecticut’s zoning less exclusionary and provide for greater housing diversity and affordability.
At the time, the coalition, founded and led by law professor Sara Bronin, consisted of 25 Connecticut organizations. Today the DesegregateCT coalition has grown to 66 Connecticut organizations representing many different interests ranging from the environment to historic preservation to affordable housing and ending homelessness.
Thursday afternoon, DesegregateCT hosted a news conference outside the State Capitol to mark that SB 1024 was voted out of the Planning and Development Committee.
“Our coalition is grateful to the Planning and Development Committee for advancing this important legislation,” Bronin said. “We will work with legislators to restore provisions on transit-oriented development and small-scale multi-family housing, which are important for Connecticut’s longterm growth.”
Rep. Cristin McCarthy-Vahey (D-Fairfield), co-chair of the Planning and Development Committee, among several legislators and others participating in the news conference, expressed confidence that progress would be made. “Modernizing our zoning laws is critical to addressing our housing crisis, inequality and our state’s long-term economic growth.”
It’s the Christian Holy Week and Jewish Passover this week of systemic racism on the split-screen in my mind. I’m now looking to that screen hoping to see the long arc of the moral universe bend closer toward justice.