Inconvenient truths

The existence of racism in the United States has betrayed any guarantee of equal justice since the inception of this country. False narratives about people of color — particularly that black men have a criminal nature — have abounded for centuries and are amplified by today’s internet.

This mischaracterization of black men engenders fear and aggression by whites. We are reminded of this once more with the murder of George Floyd by a white policeman, for the crime of paying for a purchase with a counterfeit $20 bill, and by the deaths of Philando Castile, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, and Breonna Taylor, among others, all at the hands of white police officers who had no rational reason to kill any of them.

The killing of Trayvon Martin and Ahmoud Arbury also reflect the racist belief that black men are dangerous even when jogging or walking through a neighborhood. With each death has come a false story about how it happened. We count on journalists to discover the facts and to make us aware of the true story.

When I was running errands in the county last Tuesday, I overheard someone saying policemen had been lured into traps by protesters’ calls for help and that the policemen had then been shot. This was said to have happened in Richmond and in Louisville. I looked through the Richmond and Louisville papers and saw no mention of such an ambush. I know there are many stories on the internet that feed the belief the protesters are violent and criminal, especially those who are black. These stories bolster the already existing conviction that people of color are dangerous.

I was able to check the truth of this rumor by looking at the stories written and photographed by people like Wil Sands — brave journalists who were at the protests and who fact check their stories. Were it not for these journalists, we would have no idea which stories are true and which are not.

We have a president who finds facts not only inconvenient but irrelevant. He has called those who do tell us the truth “the enemy of the people.” There has rarely been a time like this in the United States when the police force, encouraged by the taunts of the president, has purposefully injured journalists, Wil among them.

Autocrats suppress journalists because they tell inconvenient truths. So thank you, Wil, for having the courage to be on the front lines and the courage to tell the story. And thank you to all the journalists who risk their health and their lives to try to discover and write about the facts. As we can’t be reminded often enough, facts matter.