A moment to make the impossible possible
The horror leaps off the screen as state troopers, wielding whips and billy clubs, mercilessly beat peaceful civil rights demonstrators who have made their way reverently across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
In portraying the assault on the March 7, 1965, demonstration in all its brutality, the 2014 movie “Selma” makes clear why that day is forever known as “Bloody Sunday.”
And by interspersing the portrayal of violence with scenes of Americans recoiling in revulsion as their television sets bring the cruelty into their living rooms, the film tells an additional truth: A single, traumatic event can change minds, move consciences, and galvanize a nation.
Five months after Bloody Sunday, on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.
There are moments when the impossible suddenly becomes possible. Our time must be one of them.
The sheer evil of George Floyd’s killing on May 25, which was captured by cell phone and broadcast to the world, has transformed us in ways no one anticipated on May 24.
A case can be made that the ground was prepared by a growing revulsion over President Donald Trump’s racist divisiveness and the progressive impulses of a diverse younger generation.
But what police officer Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd brought home to white Americans the truth of African American vulnerability and oppression in a way that could not be pushed aside.
“We saw a person martyred before our very eyes,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told a group of columnists last week. “We saw it. We didn’t hear about it. It wasn’t reported. We didn’t see a film later. We saw a person martyred before our very eyes: eight minutes and 46 seconds. It’s a long time. It’s a long time … That is not who Americans think we are.”
That is not who Americans think we are.
Of course, as Pelosi suggested later, it should not have taken that video to remind white Americans that the events “before our very eyes” were very much part of the United States that African Americans have always known. It should not have taken Bloody Sunday to create a sense of urgency for voting rights, either.
But what will we do with this moment? We should bear in mind that white Americans have a history of giving up the fight for racial justice in ways that African
Americans cannot.
Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War was demolished by the white terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and white indifference in the North. The great progress toward racial equality of the mid1960s was followed by a long backlash that began later in the decade and culminated in Trump’s ascent.
Still, it matters that Trump is pulling all the traditional backlash levers - and, so far, nothing is happening.
He shouts on Twitter about “LAW & ORDER!” speaks of “dominating” the streets, defends Confederate monuments as “heritage,” never noting that the “heritage” in question is white supremacy, the monuments having been erected to celebrate the rise of Jim Crow or, later, to resist dismantling it.
Yet those who cowered before Trump (the National Football League comes to mind) are cowering no longer. Arguments for Confederate symbols that seemed insurmountable only weeks ago are suddenly deemed tone deaf as the military expresses openness to changing the names of Army bases named after Confederate generals and NASCAR bans the stars and bars.
Do not underestimate the importance of this: The durability of Confederate nostalgia is a mark of our 155-year failure to declare the issues of the Civil War as finally settled.
But the coming months are critical as the news turns inevitably back to the resurgence of the novel coronavirus. Former Vice President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress have an obligation to turn the shock of moral recognition from Floyd’s murder into a movement for a new community.
Precisely because Biden is widely seen as a traditional figure of restoration, he has been given an historic opportunity to argue that restoration demands change. To become “who we think we are,” Americans must break decisively not only with the Trumpian present but also with the long history of reaction the president represents.
More than that: Biden can make the case, as he has begun to, that those who genuinely seek, yes, law and order must embrace justice and reform as the only alternatives to fragmentation and ongoing chaos. We will continue to be tormented, as the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer observed, as long as we refuse to deal comprehensively with our legacy of racism.
“No justice, no peace” is not just a slogan. It is a truthful statement. For the first time in a long time, a large majority of Americans, moved by realities they can no longer deny, seem ready to sign up.