George Floyd died with a white cop’s knee on his neck, just as Eric Garner died with a white cop’s arm around his throat, just as lives of color have been snuffed out since long before America was even America. For over four hundred years on this continent alone, people of color have been enslaved, dehumanized, exploited, marginalized, tortured, lampooned, and dismissed, yet White America still expects people of color to react with civility—this despite the recent, overwhelmingly white protests in favor of “re-opening the country.” Look at those pictures of heavily armed white men screaming in the face of police and medical personnel, all because they can’t go to their favorite bar or get a pedicure, and an honest mind would have to wonder what America would look like if these apoplectic citizens had come from a four-centuries-long history in which their ancestors, friends, and relatives were murdered, raped, and denied human rights.
“Two wrongs do not make a right,” some have said in the wake of the violence in Minneapolis, as they also said after Ferguson, and Los Angeles, and Detroit, and Watts, and on and on, proving that small minds default to clichés when real arguments fail. No, I suppose two wrongs don’t make anything right, but neither does faux outrage. Plus, if you suggest that there is anything systemically cancerous in America, this “outrage” turns to defensiveness. If you are willing to concede the immorality of Derek Chauvin’s actions without a concurrent inclination to change the system that produced him, you are still part of the problem, for it is the American system that cries out for change.
Perhaps start with yourself. If you constantly feel the need to defend the white supremacist capitalist heteronormative patriarchy, ask yourself why that is. Then ask how your indignance over others’ protests fit, or fail to, with the values you claim to embrace.
“What good does it do to burn down businesses and police stations, especially in your own neighborhoods?” some people ask. First of all, that “your own neighborhoods” is usually code for “the places in which we allow you to exist, separate and unequal.” How many of us would feel lasting affection for our prison?
Second, when the system constantly fails and those who benefit from the system offer, at best, hollow words of solidarity without concurrent action, it is not the fault of the system’s victims.
Third, such a question assumes that humans always respond to horror, pain, and frustration with pure logic. Think again about those pictures you’ve seen of heavily armed white people screaming in the face of the authorities and medical responders. Remember that those pictures were taken only a couple of months after a blanket stay-at-home order whose purpose is to stop a pandemic, that most of the people in those pictures have only been inconvenienced, not oppressed. Try to empathize with those who come from a long history of real oppression—slavery, the destruction of families, armed and organized denial of constitutional rights, and on and on. How can we expect civil and logical responses to incivility and illogic, especially when it all happens over and over again?
America always demands that oppressed peoples react humbly and peacefully, no matter how repugnant the offense. And yet no civil protest is good enough, either. Ask Colin Kaepernick what happened to his NFL career after a peaceful protest. Ask Black Lives Matter participants who were demonized as racist for their temerity in peacefully protesting systemic racism. Think of assassinated black leaders, raped black women, murdered black children. At what point would you dismiss logic as a productive response? When would you abandon hope in “working within the law”? What would you do to change the world for your children in ways it wasn’t changed for you? What, in your mind, is the proper response to four hundred years of having a knee on your neck and your so-called allies’ “outrage,” in the wake of which nothing substantive changes?
Americans like to tell ourselves that we are the greatest nation on earth, in human history, but we are seldom honest with ourselves about the rot creeping through the heart of our mythos. We cannot be the land of equal opportunity for all people and also maintain our ambivalence over institutional inequality, which installs a hard ceiling on how so many of us can live our lives and all too often kills us. We are hundreds of years overdue for an accounting. And if that accounting is not civil, if it becomes violent, we shouldn’t wonder why. We’ve had plenty of chances to do things differently.
John F. Kennedy once warned, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” What have we actually done to encourage peaceful revolution—or, better yet, to eliminate the need for revolution at all? Americans should ponder that question before villainizing those who have already suffered so much.