Floyd killing: How to turn anger into action “I
’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore” was the famous outcry from the broadcaster in the movie “Network.” Here’s George Floyd’s version. But he can’t shout it because of the knee on his throat.
His moans for mercy, his plaintive calls to “Momma,” are ignored. Slowly, painfully, that knee became his God.
But it’s really the knee of an entire nation. Want to feel the knee on your neck? Hold your breath long as you can. From birth to the grave. Make a game of it.
George Floyd lived and played that game, against his will, and the knee won. The knee always wins.
As long as inequality is given little more than lip service, the knee will stay on the neck of the poor, most firmly upon poor people of color. We miss the point entirely if we seek only the conviction of the four Minneapolis police officers directly involved, but exonerate our nation, the true defendant.
If we fail to own up to and address systemic injustices in virtually every corner of our country, we will continue to see more unrest, more division, more death. Unless good people of conscience and religious leaders of all faiths speak out and insist upon much-needed change, the knee shall remain our country’s God.
Watching that powerful knee on Mr. Floyd’s throat, I glimpsed the fork in our nation’s road: one path to love and decency, the other to the depths of hatred and destruction.
We learned it in the sanitized white establishment history we were spoon fed in high school: “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.” Sadly, even that hallowed truth required a bullet to the head to survive being expurgated. Our national knee is violence.
Our “original sin” survives. One horrific death after another floats by like some macabre Disney spectacular, yet we do little. Why? Because it always happens somewhere else?
Well, it’s here, it’s in America, in your backyard. Watch the full video of George Floyd’s eyes slowly setting in the west of our nation’s future. The knee continues destroying us.
Mr. Floyd’s death was as barbarous as the assassin’s bullet that killed Martin Luther King Jr. It was as sadistic as the nooses growing our uniquely American “strange fruit.”
That officer’s knee morally drowns our nation in the headwaters of hatred springing deliberately and directly from the very top of our political river. Even as I write this just a week after Mr. Floyd’s death, already too many Americans have dialed back their moral lenses to focus on the riots of a few in order to fade out the misery of the many — the historically dispossessed who ask only for justice, for economic fairness, for basic human needs, for equality.
For removal of the knee.
Two knees tell the true racial story of America and it ain’t the greatness we love to ridiculously boast. And it sure as hell is not post-racial, as many like to adopt as a balm for their conscience.
Much of white America froths at the mouth with righteous anger when they see Colin
Kaepernick’s knee touch the grass. But where is their frenzy and fury when the weighty knee of this entire hemisphere lands for nine minutes upon the neck of a fellow human being?
Where’s the recognition that the knee has been there for 400 years?
So, what to do?
Got power? Use it for right. Got a voice? Let’s hear denouncements. Got a newspaper? Use ink and paper. Have a vote? Crawl, if you must, to the booth.
Lead a police force or prosecutor’s office? Educate, sensitize, humanize. Lead a classroom, school, school district or college? Teach the undeniable truth about the seeds of these 21st century racial assassinations and how they were firmly planted, for cold hard cash, centuries ago, deep in and upon American soil.
And if you worship a just God, take a knee, no, take two — and pray for love, for justice, for an end to the killing.