Day Six: Fear and Anger
Protests have now spread pretty much everywhere across the country. And the narrative has begun to change in the past forty-eight hours. What began as peaceful protests have in many places devolved into violence – acts of property destruction (fires, looting) which tend to grow worse as the nights wear on – thus the curfews being imposed on most of America’s larger cities. But who’s committing these acts? Our country is so riven by discord that two diametrically-opposed, equally-plausible claims are emerging: those on the right maintain those on the left are responsible, and those on the left claim these acts are being committed by those on the right. And then there’s the specter of possible agents provocateurs playing a role in inciting destruction, a technique not unknown from previous eras of civil unrest in the U.S.
Why can’t all these be true, simultaneously? In the midst of a pandemic which has already put 40 million people out of work, in the face of a coming surge in evictions and homelessness, when people are facing the prospect of no job, no health insurance, no house over their heads and no food to put on the table, it seems reasonable that there’s going to be a lot of fear and anger welling up and spilling over regardless of one’s political leanings.
When a country descends into darkness – which is where the U.S. is headed right now – the words of authorities, even when well-intentioned and carefully-chosen, tend to be interpreted as hypocritical. And when the words of authority and the rule of law are disregarded, it then becomes necessary for the state’s enforcement arm, be that local law enforcement, the state police, the National Guard or the US military, to reinstate the rule of law to protect property and life, although one may wonder which of the two is given precedence.
How long must America’s black citizens wait before their schools and their neighborhoods are equal to those of whites? How long before their earnings are at parity with those of whites, their disposable wealth equal to that of whites? How long before their health outcomes are equal to those of whites? How long before their rights as citizens – rights to which they have exactly the same constitutional guarantee as whites – are finally acknowledged in deeds and not in words alone? There’s a reason this blog was named “Deedspeakout” – concrete deeds matter far more than abstract rhetoric.
Blacks have waited, and waited, and waited – since the era of slavery, during Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, during and after the World Wars which saw America rise to become a world power and still, they have waited. They’ve waited more than a half-century since the slew of Civil Rights legislation passed in the 1960s – the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965), the Fair Housing Act (1968) – and yet their civil rights are still trampled on, their voting rights are still diminished by every means possible, and housing integration (the ultimate intent of the FHA) remains nothing but fine words on paper, despite the fact that those words represent the law of the land.
During the past fifty years, blacks have organized on all the above fronts. They’ve developed strong community organizing tools and groups. Black churches are beacons of community support and activism. They have opened lines of communication with local officials – some of whom are themselves black – and with state and national lawmakers. They hear fine words from these lawmakers in times of crises – we’ve heard some eloquent expressions of sorrow, of contrition, of promises to do better in future from governors and mayors and legislators over the past few days – but why should they believe these words?
The Mayor of Atlanta, in a moving address to the residents of her city, advised blacks to register to vote. This advice was given in a state whose governor is doing everything possible to ensure that blacks will be prevented from voting by every means at his disposal. The Mayor of Chicago gave a fine speech, but she has blocked off the entire city center and shut down public transportation, thus making it impossible for workers (many of whom are black, many of whom work in healthcare) to get back and forth from their place of employment. The Chicago Public Schools announced that they’re continuing online classes but discontinuing meal services to their poorest and neediest students. And the city (actually, the entire state) has shut down all community COVID-19 testing centers. What counts more, the Mayor’s words, or her deeds?
Informed voices from the left are calling yet again for police reform: but when we see law enforcement in military grade riot gear, using pepper spray and tear gas and rubber bullets, driving armored SUVs through lines of demonstrators, deploying drones and tanks gifted from the Department of Defense, how can we possibly implement meaningful reforms in the short term? In any case, the police reform movement isn’t new – lots of police departments have been reformed in the past decade, and look where that’s got us.
U.S. law enforcement is what it is, and when we hear calls for it to be de-funded and disarmed, to be replaced by community services and neighborhood collaboration – good suggestions of course, and pretty successful when thoughtfully implemented – we must also recall that America has the most heavily-armed citizen population in the world. We have more firearms than we have people, and that means that law enforcement has to be tailored accordingly. We can’t disarm the police, and we can’t put every police department in the country under a federal consent decree, either.
Many are outraged at police brutality as seen in the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd last week, and now in many cities – a lot of gratuitously cruel treatment of peaceful protestors, a lot of unprovoked attacks on innocent people, a lot of arrests of people who will be exposed to COVID-19 in city and county jail holding cells over the next few days. There have been more than 50 attacks on / arrests of credentialed journalists exercising their First Amendment rights. One reporter was blinded by a rubber bullet; a black-Latino CNN reporter was arrested live on national television, never informed of the reason, and only released following intervention by the company’s CEO and the Governor of Minnesota. There have been too many such incidents to enumerate since Omar Jimenez’ arrest on Saturday morning (the Guardian is collecting them; last we checked there were more than 50 documented cases), so it looks like the word has gone out: journalists are fair game. This is something we haven’t seen previously on a wide scale, and it is a new and disturbing feature of these protests.
Just at the moment when the need for national leadership is greatest, we are bereft. The President was in a bunker on Friday night, and on Sunday night the White House went completely dark for the first time in the living memory of native Washingtonians, a powerful symbol of what’s happening if ever there was one. The U.S. Senate is on a coronavirus recess – in reality, of course, the Senate Majority Leader doesn’t want the Senate to act on the next Covid-19 relief bill (nicknamed the “HEROES Act” in its House version). This, when another 20-30% of the U.S. population will be thrown into poverty over the next couple months as rent moratoria are removed and enhanced unemployment benefits run out (July). Individual states have been left to their own devices, each operating like a nation-state with greater or fewer resources, more or less capable leadership, but without the ability to print money to pay for vastly greater needs. How long before towns and cities start declaring bankruptcy? How long before states start slashing budget allocations for precisely those services which are most desperately needed?
Order will have to be restored perforce – that’s one of the key roles of the state, to impose and maintain civil order so that society can continue to function, even in a much-weaker condition than before.
But what about the murder of George Floyd, and of Philando Castile? Of Trayvon Martin (the 17-year-old boy who’d gone out to fetch some candy)? Of Eric Garner in Staten Island? Of Tamir Rice (who was 12, and holding a toy gun)? Of Breonna Taylor (the EMT in Louisville who was shot in her own home?) Of Michael Brown (Ferguson, 2014)?
What about their lives, their hopes, their dreams? We close today with Langston Hughes:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Blacks’ dreams have been deferred for forever. It’s your call, America.