San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
The moment when, together, we can bend the arc may have arrived.
“The great majority of Americans are uneasy with injustice but unwilling to pay a significant price to eradicate it.” Martin Luther King Jr., “Where Do We Go
from Here: Chaos or Community?”
We are in a moment that may be evolving into a movement, an inflection point in our nation’s history that may be historic.
In the time of an unprecedented pandemic that has taken the lives of more than 100,000 Americans in four months, an unprecedented wave of marches over the death of one man is spreading across the nation.
We have been delivered here by the death of George Floyd, pinned under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer now charged with murder. But why George Floyd? Why now?
For generations, African Americans have protested unfair and brutal treatment by law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Long are the list of names of unarmed black men, women and children killed by police and vigilantes.
Floyd isn’t the first black man whose unjust death while in the custody of police was captured on video, so why has he captured the sustained outrage of millions of people around the world?
One reason may be that his death didn’t happen in the flash and seconds of a gunshot, but over nine deliberate minutes after he’d begged for his life.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase the “banality of evil” in writing about Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, whom she didn’t find monstrous but ordinary and “terrifyingly normal.”
Even after Floyd was no longer responsive and another officer said he couldn’t find a pulse, Officer Derek Chauvin, cool, casual and seemingly unconcerned, continued kneeling on him.
For African Americans, racism isn’t always the monstrous face of a Klansman or Bull Connor sicking dogs on black marchers in Birmingham, Ala. It’s more often the cool, casual and unconcerned demeanor of a Derek Chauvin unable to acknowledge the damage being done by his knee to the neck.
In his last book, “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: “Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.”
Slavery is the original sin of the United States, but redemption only begins with acknowledging the racism that justified the “peculiar institution” and infected all American institutions to this day. For millions of Americans, racism isn’t a fictional crutch excusing failures, but a real chokehold on opportunities.
For whatever reasons, the death of George
Floyd has moved many white Americans into acknowledging the burden and despair of racism carried by African Americans, and, importantly, understanding that using one’s experiences as the reference point by which to judge the experiences of others isn’t a pathway to understanding.
This George Floyd moment is different. Never has the death of one person stirred the conscience of this nation and mobilized so many into daily, nonviolent, multiracial and multigenerational protests.
But if this inflection point is to rise and not dip, if we are to have community and not chaos, the protests must be transformed into policies correcting the inequities of institutional racism.
This could range from bail reform to address the inequities of cash bail, to closing our ongoing digital divide, to requiring warnings before police officers shoot and reporting any time officers brandish their weapons. The policies are almost endless because our longstanding inequalities are so entrenched and pervasive.
If there’s truth to the saying that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice, in this moment, the arc is in our hands to bend in the direction we choose.