There’s a sickness killing our country. No, it’s not just COVID-19.
There’s a sickness running rampant in our country.
It doesn’t respect economic class or geographical boundaries. It infects the wealthy and the poor, the North, the South, the East, the West. It affects us all, though it harms some far more than others. It flares routinely, but also out of the blue, and it’s not going away anytime soon.
I’m not talking about COVID-19. I mean the deadly disease called structural racism.
I stipulate “structural” because the racism that infects American society isn’t just a problem of a person here or there saying or doing something ugly based on skin color. The sickness runs wider and deeper than individuals. It seeps into nearly all our systems of being, though it’s through individuals with names and faces that the disease is easiest to recognize.
George Floyd.
That was the name of the 46-yearold man who died Monday in Minneapolis.
A bystander’s cellphone video tells the story: For almost nine minutes, a white police officer kneels on the neck of a black man while the man pinned to the street — George Floyd, handcuffed and unarmed — says repeatedly, “I can’t breathe.” Other officers at the scene don’t intervene. Later, George Floyd dies, and his name becomes the latest in a long list of black people, mostly men, killed by police for no evident cause.
Across the country, protests broke out. In Minneapolis, the uprising turned violent and included some looting. The National Guard was summoned. Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, pleaded for an end to the chaos, but acknowledged the chronic pain beneath the damage.
“I refuse to have it take away the attention from the stain that we need to be working on,” he said. “These are things that have been brewing in this country for 400 years.”
For “stain” he could have said “sickness.”
The sickness of structural racism extends far beyond police forces. But it’s in situations involving police that the violence inherent in American racism is most vivid. The fact that we need the police complicates finding a cure.
And the police we need most desperately? Those brave enough to speak the truth.
We need the ones like Chicago’s new police chief, David Brown, who is black, who said the other day: “What took place in Minneapolis earlier this week is absolutely reprehensible and tarnished the badge nationwide, including here in Chicago.”
We need the ones like Kristen Ziman, the white police chief in the Chicago suburb of Aurora, who tweeted: “People of color are outraged. White people are outraged. Any cop who doesn’t feel the same should get out of our profession.”
She also tweeted this: “Resisting suffocation is not resisting arrest.”
If we’re ever going to beat this sickness, we need leaders in every realm — in politics, schools, health care — who understand its deep history, or at least try to. We need leaders who can speak frankly but with control, who help us think clearly.
We need a leader who can sum up the disease as succinctly as Barack Obama did in a tweet on Friday: “It’s natural to wish for life ‘to just get back to normal’ as a pandemic and economic crisis upend everything around us. But we have to remember that for millions of Americans, being treated differently on account of race is tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal’ — whether it’s while dealing with the health care system, or interacting with the criminal justice system, or jogging down the street, or just watching birds in a park.”
In those few words, the former president offered a glimmer of the cure: Acknowledge the depth and breadth of the disease.
Meanwhile, the current president was tweeting about the “thugs” in Minneapolis and, in what appeared to be a threat, added, “When the looting
The sickness of structural racism extends far beyond police forces. But it’s in situations involving police that the violence inherent in American racism is most vivid.
starts, the shooting starts.”
In the past few days, I’ve heard several black people use the word “traumatic” to describe what watching the video of George Floyd felt like to them. I’d like to say I understand that trauma and I believe that in some sense I do. But I doubt that as a white person I can fully comprehend it.
One thing white people can do, however, is recognize that there are limits to what we understand about being black in a country that has made dark skin so dangerous for so many for so long. We can try to understand better. One way we can try is to listen.
Listen to how black people respond to the shooting of George Floyd. Hear those reactions in the context of 400 years of systemic racism.
It won’t be a cure. But it’s a start.