2020 is the New 1968
In 1968, during my senior year in college, the nation and the world were in turmoil. During the course of the year a mindboggling number of significant events occurred: the assassination of Martin Luther King in a Memphis hotel, the assassination of Robert Kennedy in a Los Angles hotel pantry, Eugene McCarthy’s victory in the New Hampshire presidential primary, starvation in Biafra, the fury in the streets of Chicago at the Democratic Convention, the occupation of Columbia University, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the My Lai massacre, LBJ’s decision not to seek the presidency, riots in the streets of various major American cities, the Black Power salute at the Olympics, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Apollo 8 flight around the moon and last but not least, the election of Richard M. Nixon as the 37th president of the United States.
1968 has been described by TIME Magazine as “the year that shaped a generation” – “a year when innocence died and the world turned upside down.” It was not only the number of salient events that occurred in 1968, but the concatenation of events one on the top of the other. 2020 has the feel of 1968 on steroids.
Day-in and day-out we are being exposed to the anti-democratic tweet, utterances and bizarre actions of Donald Trump and two generational pandemics at the same time – the COVID-19 viral pandemic and the police brutality and racism pandemic. More than 125,000 Americans have died so far from the coronavirus and tens of thousands more will perish before a vaccine is developed and disseminated.
More and more, we are bearing witness, because of citizens and their cell phone cameras, to indisputable evidence of murders being committed against unarmed black men by white police officers and white vigilantes. The disproportionate number of African-Americans who are perishing from the coronavirus due to pre-existing health conditions, the shooting of 25-year old Ahmaud Arberg in a coastal South Georgia neighborhood and the killing of 46-year-old George
Floyd on a Minneapolis, Minnesota street corner are the devastating consequences of rampant institutional racism in America. The roots of that racism go back 401 years to 1619 when enslaved Africans were first brought to the British Colony of Virginia.
“The massive gatherings for racial justice across the country and now the world have achieved a scale and level of momentum not seen in decades,” reported The New York Times. While there appears to be a growing impetus among segments of the population for taking affirmative steps to confront institutional racisms in our police departments and in our criminal system, the only way to confront systemic racism and injustice is to, once and for all, address the structural barriers that account for the enormous gap in income inequality between black families and white families in America. Without intentional policy intervention the poverty rate among blacks will continue to be more than double that of white Americans.
Systematic change is very challenging but it is the only way to address structural racisms that created the black white income economic injustice. It begins with replacing a president who has shown no willingness to utilize the power of government to improve the lives of those who are struggling to keep their head above water in America and has shown an unprecedented willingness to use the race card to attract voters who harbor racial prejudices.
He is prepared to run a “lawand-order” style campaign in which he will argue that “you must dominate the streets” and “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Remember this is a man who from 2011 to 2016 was a leading proponent of the alreadydebunked “Birtherism” conspiracy theory claiming President Obama was not born in the United States.
Likewise, as late as 2019, Donald Trump continued to insist that a group of black and Latino teenagers were guilty of the 1989 rape of a white woman in the Central Park jogger case, despite the fact that the five males were officially exonerated in 2002, based on a confession by an imprisoned serial rapist that was confirmed by DNA evidence.
This is a president who tried to have it both ways in the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and who made comments which implied a moral equivalence between the white supremacist marchers and those who protested against them. And this is a president who in 2018 at a White House meeting about immigration reform, called African countries as “sh-thole countries.” It is not surprising that a recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll showed 52 percent of respondents answered yes when asked whether they think that President Trump is a racist. Only 37 percent said no.
Replacing Donald Trump will not produce instant economic justice in America. This is especially true in wake of the multi-trillion-dollar deficit that America faces because of the pandemic. However, our next president must not be whetted to the status quo. He must be willing to change the paradigm, and begin to address the systemic inequality that permeates how we tax our citizens, how we educate our children and the kind of programmatic scaffolding we provide to those who are trying hard in America but are failing not because of lack of effort, but because of institutional racism.
Irwin Stoolmacher is president of the Stoolmacher Consulting Group, a fundraising and strategic planning firm that works with nonprofit agencies that serve the truly needy among us.