We must seize moment given by George Floyd
When Mamie Till decided to have an open casket for her son’s funeral, she made America stare at the face of racial violence designed to intimidate.
Before 14-year-old
Emmitt Till was murdered and mutilated for allegedly flirting with a white woman, too many accepted or ignored lynchings of Blacks. There were Americans who disapproved of such violence, but too many looked away.
The horror of seeing Emmitt’s mutilated body shook the country to its core and focused attention on the growing Civil Rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s. Laws were changed and legal segregation came to an end.
De jure segregation has ended, although de facto segregation persists. Interracial marriage is now fairly common, however, the infamous Central Park interaction between Christian Cooper and Amy Cooper suggests there is still a risk when Black men interact with white women.
Violence against Blacks carried out by vigilante mobs is uncommon, but Trayvon Martin and Amaud Arbery were killed by individuals who acted as judge, jury, and executioner. Those cases garnered our attention because George Zimmerman and Gregory and Travis McMichael were not law enforcement officers.
Too often, whites excused similar behavior by the police. Even when we were confronted with video evidence, as in the murders of Eric Garner being choked to death for selling cigarettes, and Walter Scott, who was shot in the back as he ran from police after a traffic stop, many whites rationalized those tragedies.
Now we are having this generation’s Emmitt Till moment. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated the differences in wealth, opportunity, and well being for whites and Blacks.
Everyone was horrified by the 8 minutes and 46 seconds in which a man, who took an oath to protect and to serve, squeezed the life out of a defenseless human. With the unequal effects of this pandemic, his act made it impossible to ignore that systemic racism makes it harder for Black people to succeed and makes justice unequal.
I have been working with a civil rights action group called Connecting the Dots. It is time we did just that: connect the dots from terror lynchings to mass incarceration and the resulting denial of basic rights, to the use of excessive force by police, to modern lynchings dismissed as suicide. Connect the dots from slavery to segregation to red-lining and the denial of wealth and the denial of opportunity.
Fellow white people: I challenge you to imagine your outrage if your children were in substandard schools, presumed guilty and if your homes and neighborhoods were devalued.
As you try to imagine those injustices, remember that when crack cocaine rampaged through Black neighborhoods, addiction was considered a crime. The response was more jails and mandatory sentencing. But when the opioid crisis swept through white communities, we came to recognize that addiction is a disease, and the cure is treatment and counseling.
Let us all connect the dots and consider other examples of social policy stained by racism. The generosity of spirit that provides systemic comfort, opportunity, and justice for some, must be extended to all.
This is our moment — seize it by demanding police reform. Seize it by examining the unconscious bias that allows us to avert our eyes.
Seize it by challenging the systems and policies in education, housing, health, and criminal justice that perpetuate inequities in opportunity and justice, inequities that are antithetical to the principles most treasured by Americans.