A 26-year-old emergency medical technician innocent of any wrongdoing is killed in a spray of police bullets in her own home. A man is calmly choked to death by a police officer indifferent to his cries for mercy. The beloved owner of a popular Kentucky BBQ stand is cut down while feeding protestors.
Breonna Taylor. George Floyd. David McAtee. They were our fellow Americans, precious human beings with families and others who loved and needed them. They are just three of many. Too many.
Our nation once again faces a reckoning of its Original Sin. We are once again called to account for our society’s deeply embedded structural racism, laid bare anew in its bloodiest manifestations. We are once again confronted by the unbounded oppression and injustice committed against Black people for four centuries.
Racism in America is not simply a matter of “hatred.” There are certainly plenty of bigots and white supremacists in this country, but there are not enough of them to perpetuate systemic racism. The problem is much more widespread. As any gardener knows, a noxious weed with deep roots cannot be eradicated by pruning. Failure to fully root it out allows it to spread its poison.
Take Amy Cooper, for example. When asked by a Black man in Central Park to obey the law and put her dog on a leash, she did not hesitate to put 400 years of systemic racism to work against him.
The
Daily Show
’s Trevor Noah spoke about the incident earlier this week:
What we saw with her was a really, really powerful explicit example of an understanding of racism in a structural way. When she looked…at that man…and she said to him, “I’m going to call 911 and I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American male threatening my life,” she knew how powerful that was. And that in itself is telling. It tells you how she perceives the police. It tells you how she perceives her relationship with the police as a white woman. It shows you how she perceives a black man’s relationship with the police and the police’s relationship with him. It was powerful because so many people act like they don’t know what Black Americans are talking about when they say it. And yet Amy Cooper had a distinct understanding. She’s like, “Oh, I know. I know that you’re afraid of interacting with the police because there is a presumption of your guilt because of your blackness. I know that as a white woman I can weaponize this tool against you. And I know that by the time we’ve sifted through who was right and who was wrong, there’s a good chance you will have lost in some way, shape or form.”
For 400 years the prevailing reality of being Black in America is that their lives do not matter. Yet when this obvious fact is pointed out there is always someone there to snap back, “All lives matter.” As if the problem of racism in our country is not centered on Black people. As if 400 years of re-committing the Original Sin does not demand that we point that out.
Every decent religion or philosophy of life on our planet is built upon some version of a dictum to honor the fundamental equality and dignity of all people. It’s enshrined in scriptures, declarations, and manifestos. Yet it never seems to truly guide us; to become the central focus of our lives that we proclaim it to be.
Humanism is built on the idea that humanity can progress by discovering ways to be better than we’ve been before. This is an inflection point. The time for complacency and silence is over. Now we must act on the principles we humans pronounce in all of our pretty statements.
For were we not asked by our Sage, “If not now, then when?”
