Black pain continues to go unheard. America, are you listening?
Monica Rohr says more are outraged over masks during a pandemic than over 400 years of black oppression.
There are many who will see only the stores swirled by fire and smoke — and not the last gasps of a dying man. There are many who will focus only on the rage of people driven to civil unrest — and not on a system that trains police officers to stare impassively while bystanders beg him to stop squeezing the life from another human being’s body.
There are many who will contend that the white woman walking her dog in Central Park was just having an off day when she unnecessarily called police on an African-American birdwatcher — and overlook her wielding of a deeply ingrained racist trope long used to terrorize black men.
It’s convenient to look past the racism that permeates every niche and corner of our society, and instead blame a few rogue cops and 911-calling Karens caught on video. It’s more comfortable to turn away than to open our eyes to the countless, soul-wearying indignities that this country has inflicted on its black citizens.
It’s easier to write racism off as mere implicit bias, ignorance or a slip of the tongue than to call it by its name. It’s much harder to stare unflinchingly in the mirror.
But that is exactly what this country needs to do. What we all must do.
We must heed the despair, the anger, the frustration, the exhaustion, the howl of pain rising up from Minneapolis, where 46-yearold George Floyd died under the knees of a police officer for allegedly passing a fake $20 bill, to Houston, where Floyd grew up, was a standout on the Yates High School basketball team, and where his family is now in mourning.
From New York City, where Christian Cooper was the target of a false report to 911 because he asked a white woman to leash her dog, to Brunswick, Ga., where 25-year-old jogger Ahmaud Arbery was followed and shot to death by two men who considered him suspicious because he was black.
From cities and towns and neighborhoods across the country where black people are dying of COVID-19 at higher rates than whites yet are still turned away from hospitals and urgent care centers.
We must listen.
We must listen to Floyd’s younger sister, who is calling for the four police officers involved to be charged with murder. “They murdered my brother,” Bridgett Floyd told NBC’s Today Show.
“He was crying for help.”
We must listen to the lament of Roxie Washington, mother of Floyd’s 6-year-old daughter. “It’s cruel — they took him away from my daughter,” Washington told the Houston Chronicle on Tuesday. “She’ll never see her father again.”
We must listen to Floyd’s own last words, as he begged police officer Derek Chauvin for his life.
“I can’t breathe.”
The words echo the final moments of Eric Garner, a 43-yearold black man who died in July 2014 after a New York City police officer put him in a choke hold. His alleged crime? Selling single cigarettes from packs without tax stamps.
As Garner lay dying, he, too, repeatedly cried: “I can’t breathe.”
More than a mantra for the Black Lives Matter movement and for those protesting police violence, the phrase is an apt encapsulation of what it means to be black in America. Unable to drive, shop, jog, work out or watch birds without being viewed as dangerous or suspicious, without being deemed a predator or being made a victim.
Last week, the refrain rang out again. On social media posts and in street protests.
In a tweet from historian Ibram X. Kendi: “It is becoming harder and harder for me to breathe without thinking of #GeorgeFloyd.” On a Facebook post from Baltimore radio host and educator Karsonya Wise Whitehead: “My youngest is 17: bold, brilliant, and black in a white world. And now as a black mother, I can’t breathe.”
It was the undercurrent fueling the rage flaring in the streets of Minneapolis, what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the language of the unheard.”
“What is it that America has failed to hear?” he asked in his 1967 “The Other America” speech. “It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity.”
What was true then remains true today. America has still failed to hear the plight of the black community, still failed to live up to its promises of liberty and justice for all. Far too many are inclined to wallow in the offense of being called a racist than to confront their biases and take action to dismantle a system that encourages racism to flourish.
It should not take a viral video that puts black death and suffering on public display for us to recognize that. It should not take a howl of pain for change to happen.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey acknowledged the roots of that pain, noting that the protests careening out of control in his city are the result of “anger and sadness that has been ingrained in our black community — not just because of five minutes of horror, but 400 years.”
Sadly, some Americans will be more outraged at the burning of a Target store than by decades of redlining, segregation and disenfranchisement that left black communities marginalized and blocked from sharing in their own country’s promise. They are angrier about being forced to wear a mask during a deadly pandemic than about the health care and societal inequities that lead to alarming rates of COVID-19 among black people.
They express more outrage about Colin Kaepernick peacefully taking a knee to protest police brutality than by a system that all too often allows police to get away with that brutality.
Far too many are not willing to hear the cries of those gasping for air. And that’s the problem.