~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Last week I wrote with hope about our whites and our blacks inching toward rapprochement – cops shaking hands with protestors; protestors protecting one lone cop from other protestors bent on getting even – peaceful protestors with friendly protectors.
This week, we see a group of whites on the roadside of a march route in New Jersey re-enacting white Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of black George Floyd until, after 8 minutes and 46 seconds, Floyd died.
I could hardly believe my eyes at the cruel play-acting. Who would be so insensitive? So mean-spirited? Obviously, a white man with no human decency, let lone any brains.
After watching that news clip a couple times, I finally realized that there are people who would be happy to do it, kneel on a black man’s neck till he died.
We are not close to halting the centuries-long practice of brutalizing and murdering African Americans.
I don’t know why any blacks talk to white people. They can’t get a decent education because their tax money doesn’t go to their grade schools and high schools in the same way it goes to white schools. They can’t get good jobs because of this lack of fairness in education. If they do manage a good education, they often can’t get the best job, the house in any neighborhood they admire – they can’t even get a polite nod from a policeman.
Black parents have to give their children “the talk.” This is a heads-up on how to kowtow to any lawman if stopped for any reason. There is no “innocent until proven guilty” – if you’re black, you did something. Sometimes just walking out of their own house gets them arrested. Or, like with Louisville EMT Breonna Taylor who was killed on May 13, sleeping in her own bed, there may be no place to hide…if you’re black.
Because of the plethora of videos on the streets right now, I witness a fully armed and bullet-proofed white cop punching a 10-year-old black boy in the face; a cop so buffered by body armor that he looks like a turtle – actually, an overweight Ninja turtle – spraying something in the eyes of a black woman standing in front of him; I see three or four white cops pull a black man off his bicycle and commence beating him with billy clubs; I see the egg-sized wound on a black woman’s forehead from a rubber bullet – had it hit her eye, she’d have been blinded; I see several cops charging after fleeing marchers, wildly swinging batons and billy clubs and shields at all before them, mowing down protestors like shafts of wheat. I watch policemen on horses galloping into a street of protestors frightened and screaming, trying to get out of their way; I see police cars doing the same – the protestors running for their lives.
I watch the fury of a black woman yelling into the microphone of a reporter who asks her, “Why is it that blacks burn down their own buildings?” With a great deal of profanity and no holding back, the black woman informs the reporter that blacks own nothing, they never can get a bank loan. So, if they’re looting and burning, it’s not their store or their building they’re ruining – the act is their unbridled outrage at the centuries-old instability of their entire existence. There has never been an even playing field; there has in fact been, at best, unfairness and demeaning of blacks old and young, male and female; at worst, beating, whipping, and of course murder. Four centuries of it.
Blacks are not poor because they’re lazy or stupid; they’re poor because the rules and the laws keep them down, just as if they were still enslaved.
“Killing” a building by fire and theft cannot be compared to slowly kneeing a man to death. When the two are compared, it indicates that property means more to whites than a black human life.
I have marched twice in the past two weeks – peaceful parades with friendly law enforcement and protestors following the rules. The protestant signs were telling, however:
- “Racism is so American that when you protest it, people think you’re protesting America” [Well, yeah.]
- “How many weren’t filmed?” [This one should be used in all white-on-black court trials.]
- “End white male oppression” [Rhymes with the ‘Me Too’ movement.]
- “Names of 313 blacks killed by cops between 2013 and 2020” [a 4’x 6’ placard propped against a tree.]
- “Why don’t cops who kill unarmed blacks go to prison?” [The fix is in.]
I have black friends with whom I can talk freely, but these friendships are lucky happenstance. Blacks I do not know whom I approach seldom will talk to me for long. Why should they?
I asked my black friend Martha – author, professor of black history, instructor in police precincts and in schools on how to treat and teach young black males – “What would be the best thing for whites to do?”
She said, “Do what you do. In your case, write. Use what you know to inform others, to open their eyes. Some people are good community organizers, some are good lobbyists in Congress, some are good teachers, like me. Just do what you’re good at. Any white person who sees us as human, well, we need you on our side. Loud.”
So, if you are not thoroughly jaded by having to witness the bloody situation from the remove of a TV set, step up. Within your area of expertise and strength, go out there and, if nothing else, investigate the facts that have been buried with the blacks beneath the entire length of our country’s history. Once you learn, it’s difficult to remain silent.
Another sign at the last march I attended: “Silence is complicity”
