Unhealed wounds
Protests and rebellions cannot be transitory acts in an ongoing trauma of racism.
We are not even halfway past what is arguably the worst year in many of our lifetimes. Every week seems to bring something worse. The virus was a new wound on a tired flesh inflicted by an unseen enemy. A community that was disproportionately affected by the loss of lives and livelihood is finding an old wound gashed again.
Image source: Lorie Shaull
George Floyd, just 46 years of age, was snuffed out of his life by a member of the very same institution that is chartered with protecting the life of its citizens. A smoldering rage erupts inside many of us when we see this seemingly senseless act in the context of many such happenings in the weeks past.
Black Americans are disproportionately killed by law enforcement in the US. They are 2.5 times more likely to die in the hands of the police as a white American.
It is over 27 years since the grainy video of the Rodney King beatings set off several days of looting and violence in Los Angeles. Citizen video recordings were unheard of in the early nineties and this unique capture unleashed a torrent of emotions- anger and rage at continuing injustice. I had not even set foot in the US but the happenings resonated several thousand miles away casting a doubt on what a progressive nation means.
Having grown up on a western diet of the importance of human rights and the inhumanity of the caste system, it was jarring that the most powerful country in the world exemplified the very same parochial precepts that it sought to wipe out outside of its borders.
While technology has progressed to capture anything anywhere in an unprecedented level of detail, the lives of those captured, often in the choking clasp of the law and its enforcers, are perpetually stuck in the misery of a bygone century.
The social world creates awareness with hashtags, but outrage dissipates with time, forgotten, as the curtain is drawn and a seeming sense of normalcy returns. We go back to our keyboards and comfort ourselves cocooned in a temporary expression of empathy. The system lives on, unchanged, or worse for people of color.
The instant catalogs of videos of unrest and riots, in tweets and its unrolls, capture the emotion of a country caught in chaotic times. But can we channel this into concrete corrective action?
How long do we need such honoring hashtags?
The elevation of an erudite black individual to the highest position in the country does not balance the daily injustice to millions at the hands of the resentful. In a vast country with varying degrees of awareness and education, people left behind are both victims and perpetrators.
“Why doesn’t America love us?” tweeted Lebron James, echoing possibly the painful longing to be accepted as equals in this day and age, a day when the country launched a reusable rocket into space. The reality is that half of America is still stuck in the sixties, disconnected and threatened by the rapid changes in society and technology.
When Colin Kapernick protested against police brutality he took a knee. He was protesting against systematic abuse, It is bizarre that a sports league that depends on the daily exposition of athletic prowess of gifted individuals refused to acknowledge the very injustice to the friends and families of those who brought in the money for its owners. Somehow this was normal and we continued to cheer touchdowns and turnovers, as Kapernick became a footnote in our collective memory. And then it happened again. This time the knee was on the neck.
Protests and rebellions cannot be transitory acts in an ongoing trauma of racism.
Whatever we are doing is not working. We need to find a new way. We can’t just be talking to ourselves on the coasts and the cities on Twitter and Facebook. We need a unified bi-partisan governance, at the federal, state and local levels, to rise up to the crises and mend the broken pathways to peace. We need leaders who can address and heal ALL the citizens of the nation collectively, not just to their narrow faction. The future of our kids depends on the bridge across this vast divide.