Chauvin’s conviction holds police accountable

I was asked by a friend if I believed that systemic racism exists in our country. I looked up the word systemic and found that it had to do with our circulatory system and how it works in a symmetry that allows humans to survive. Race in America has its very own systems.

Our country has faced many days of reckoning through the brave actions of civil rights leaders such as the Rev. Martin Luther King up to the recent death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman, who thought nothing of using brute force while detaining an unarmed Black citizen who was accused of passing a forged $20 bill at a store.

Little did Floyd know that history would be made with a guilty verdict on all counts for his murder. It was another step forward to wiping out racism by holding those accountable — especially the police who are trained to protect us but who did not flinch even as the breath of George Floyd slowly disappeared until he was dead. It all happened in broad daylight before a TV audience, yet we were still worried that Derek Chauvin might not be convicted.

The question is, would Chauvin have acted this way if his assailant were white? Conviction means accountability. It’s a beginning, for sure, but so many barriers have to be lifted for all races to be judged the same in America, where all men are created equal. We are a nation that has lived with systemic racism, but we are trying, and that is good.

Linda Gefen, Boca Raton