George Floyd, Racism, and a Cry for Justice

I’m mad. I’m sad. And I don’t have answers. But as I try tolisten to Black men and women in our nation and absorb what they’re saying,what they’re feeling, I feel a burden on myself. This nation was built upon thefoundation of slave labor, of looting Black bodies to enrich and profit the country,the landowners, the white folk. White people enjoyed an empire built on Blackbacks, and they never shared the bountiful harvest with the hands that pulledit from the ground. Even though the slavery has stopped, the looting of blackbodies has not. White power has had its knee on the neck of Black peoplethroughout the history of this country. Just take a look at our prison system.When white rapists get six months of jail and Black men get decades for lowlevel drug convictions, you know the system has two different standards. Whenwhite men steal millions of dollars in the financial markets yet never face realconsequences, but Kalief Browder spends three years on Rikers Island, two ofthem in solitary confinement and without even having a trial, all for the crimeof stealing a backpack, you know there’s a white finger tipping the scales ofjustice.

White supremacy and racism has been around as long as thisnation. I’d like to say that it went quiet for a while, but I know that’s nottrue. It never went anywhere. It’s just that it became less obvious for peoplelike me that grew up in a rich city where I could be oblivious and blind to it.My first reckoning with reality was when Mike Brown was killed by a cop and hisbody was left on the pavement for four and a half hours to bake in the sun. Iwatched as the events unfolded in Ferguson, shocked, tearful, heartbroken, as Isaw the trauma push people past their breaking point. That’s when I realizedthe systems of oppression are alive and well. Since then, I’ve watched as everyfew months there’s another video of a police officer taking a person’s life, manyof them black lives. There’s outrage, and then normalcy. A blip of anger, thenstatus quo. Only in the most extreme cases, and only when the footage goespublic, does a police officer get convicted of a crime.

“It’s just a few bad apples,” some say to justify theseevents. But why do we tolerate bad apples in this profession? Would we allow afew bad apples to be airline pilots? Do we have an acceptable amount of planecrashes? Do we allow for a few bad surgeons to just keep on botching surgeries?Some professions demand extremely high standards. And the mistakes these policeofficers are making are not petty. They ruin lives, generations of lives andwhole communities. And then there’s another cost. Cities spend hundreds ofmillions of dollars on settling police misconduct lawsuits. Since 2004, thecity of Chicago paid over $700 million dollars in settlement money and another $200million in legal fees. That’s just one city and a mind-boggling budgetdedicated to the consequences of deadly police conduct. Oh, and doesn’t themaxim go on to say that bad apples spoil the whole bunch?

A few years ago, when Colin Kaepernick knelt quietly on thesidelines of football games and eloquently expressed that his protest was aboutunchecked police brutality, (white) people were enraged. The President calledhim a son of a bitch. Mike Pence made a big show of going to one of his games,just so he could walk out for the “disrespect” showed to the flag. And nowtoday, those same people are saying there’s no place for the kind of protestingwe see in the streets. We must have peaceful protests, they say,oblivious to their hypocrisy. While I too would prefer peaceful protests, itsmells like a bullshit argument if you don’t allow space for the peaceful protestseither. I think it signals the real problem they have is with who is doing theprotesting.

According to the president, when white people storm thecapital buildings of our states armed with AK-47s and demand haircuts, they’regood people who are justified in their anger. The police response to the militiaovertaking these buildings is quiet, measured, almost submissive. When white supremacistsmarch in Charlottesville and literally kill a woman, the president calls them “veryfine people.” But when the nation watches four police officers suffocate andmurder a man on the street, Black people and many others take to the streets todemand justice and equality, the president calls those people THUGS, dispatchesa militarized police and threatens “when the looting starts, the shootingstarts.” Why does the president tolerate and even praise white men toting battlefieldweapons trying to intimidate our lawmakers, but brings the hammer down on Blackpeople who are hurting and pressing for justice? It doesn’t take a brilliantperson to accurately guess.

I can only assume that for some in our country, they believea Black person being robbed of life is merely an unfortunate, but acceptable thing.However, a business, a window, a building, or a white person’s comfort, wellsir, that is a thing that we cannot tolerate being bothered. If you are morebothered by the broken windows and the looting of stores than you are thelooting of Black bodies, I must ask why?

Racism, despite it sliding out of the limelight for a few years, is still as prevalent as ever. Yes, I believe progress has been made in many areas. Of that I am thankful. However we are far from living in a just and fair society. And unfortunately, too many people seem quietly okay with the status quo. I hate to say it, but it seems like those people don’t want to give up their privileges, or even admit that they have any. When you are accustomed to a society that sways in your direction, achieving equality might feel like you’re are losing something.

There is a difference between overt racism and covert racism. As white people, we tend to only get up in arms about the overt kind. If a politician uses the “n” word, we gasp and say that’s not okay. But we shrug when that politician makes policies that discriminate and ruin lives and communities. It’s as if the “n” word is the only real threshold for unacceptable racism. We don’t really care about all the covert racism, the systemic kinds we’re surrounded by every day.  For hundreds of years, Black people have felt the accumulative effect of that disadvantage, the burden of having to be exceptional to be treated as close to equal, the trauma of seeing Black bodies lying in the street at the hands of police without a hint of justice.  

To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., it is cruel to tell someone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps when you’ve robbed them of their boots.

It is cruel to push people to the breaking point, and thenshame them for breaking.

White people, we have to do better. We have to be better. Thestatus quo is not okay. It’s not okay to tolerate a president or laws orpolicies that benefit us or enrich our bank accounts at the expense of so manypeople. It’s not okay to be quiet in the heart of a system that throws every favorand advantage our way, while so many people are left out. We have to thinkabout more than ourselves or our bank accounts when it comes time to vote. Wehave to put ourselves on the line, to march, to take to the streets, to demandjustice.

I know people might have a kneejerk reaction to this andthink, “I’m not racist. Leave me out of this.” Well it’s not good enough to be passivelynot racist. We need to be actively anti-racist. We have to collectively assumeresponsibility for hundreds of years of racism, whether or not we havepersonally administered it, and work towards making society more just.  

Change does not happen without pressure. That’s why activism works. Only after the marches and protests began was the police officer who murdered George Floyd arrested. Even though the cops had the footage of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder for months, it was only after the public saw the video and were horrified that the men responsible were charged with a crime.

I know it makes us really uncomfortable. This is aconversation a lot of people are still unwilling to have. But we must be theactive ones. Remember, it is not the job of the oppressed to fix oppression. Whitesupremacy is an evil that must be rooted out. And it is our responsibility to dothat work. We must be on the forefront of bringing justice to a nation that iscrying out for it.