America still treats some of us as disposable

Twenty-one years ago, in New York City, Amadou Diallo was murdered. Police officers fired 41 bullets at him after mistaking his wallet for a gun.

My spouse, Charles, and I had just adopted our third child, and that gutwrenching display of violence ignited an internal dread. It made explicit the dangers the world offered for our black children that did not apply to us, their white parents.

Eight years ago, in the pages of the Hartford Courant, I wrote about my newest fears.

Trayvon Martin had just been murdered on a Florida sidewalk and, as I looked at my now 12-year-old, that same fear rose to the surface. I was terrified that he would eventually grow up to find an unjust world that viewed black lives like his as disposable.

The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last month was the latest example that those fears have come true. It was another public demonstration of a deep injustice in America — a country that still treats my sons, and those who look like them, as disposable. I stand with those who cannot accept another 20 years, or another day, without change. I am one of them.

For centuries, our laws have featured a built-in discrimination that has gone largely unchallenged because those who benefit from the rules have been silently enjoying that privilege and letting others bear the consequences.

Every so often, with a high-profile killing, or a slip of the tongue from a politician who says the quiet part out-loud, the true repercussions of those policies explode into public view. But they have always been there, often hiding in plain sight. Let me be extremely blunt: That comfortable, privileged silence is no longer an option.

During the height of the AIDS/HIV pandemic, gay people and brown people bore the burden.

The government chose to pretend the crisis did not exist, happy to let deaths mount in communities it then viewed as expendable. I was an AIDS activist in New York City at the time, and it was only when we combined our efforts, in coalition, that we were able to mobilize, kick open the doors of government and begin true progress in combating the virus and saving lives.

Racism is a virus. To eradicate it, we need to build a new coalition, including whites that have been silently watching it spread.

We need to lift and listen to the voices of black leaders and, for white people like me, acknowledge the ways in which the system is rigged in our favor.

As the state comptroller and an avowed policy wonk, my base instinct is to search for the policy solutions to any problem. But there is no one policy proposal — no one bill we can put before the legislature — that can completely undo the impact of a 400-year history of American racism.

Even as we have these difficult conversations about equity and equality, we are still in the midst of a deadly pandemic that has disproportionately impacted communities of color.

The economic damage left in the wake of COVID-19 will hit those same communities the hardest.

Discrimination is omnipresent and can only be dealt with in its totality. If there can’t be one policy solution, then every policy should bring us closer to one. It’s time for Connecticut to rise to the occasion and reinvent its government into one that, in its lawmaking and law enforcement, is aggressively anti-racist.

Every new law we pass should be examined for racist implications, and we must rapidly enact obvious changes to the current laws that are failing to protect and uplift our communities of color.

That should include policing reforms. To start, we must demilitarize our state and local police departments and drastically limit the use of force.

We must bring full transparency to law enforcement interactions with the public and all disciplinary actions.

We must give civil rights experts and community members greater oversight over law enforcement hiring, firing and training.

The inherently discriminatory constructs of government aren’t limited to policing, however.

They wind through our health care system, our schools, our housing policies, our elections. They begin at birth — where black mothers and their babies face higher-than-average mortality rates — and metastasize throughout all aspects of public life.

The long, tireless effort that awaits demands we start immediately tearing down the existing structure and building something better in its place.

That work has already been taking place across the country for years but has never been given the urgency it deserves by lawmakers.

Connecticut, and our nation, require governments where black and brown people feel safe, included and empowered. And one where they are — finally — adequately represented.

That is how we get to true justice. Until then, no peace and no more silence.