JUNE 10, 2020 – . . . young kids will still ask long before the halfway mark of a long road-trip. Likewise, two weeks into the post-George Floyd, Jr. era, we white-liberals behind the wheel can’t help but ask the same: “Are we there yet” in ending our nation’s legacy of discrimination?
It’s the inevitable question in a culture of #MeNow. Yet somehow, “Justice Now!” has never found its way into “#MeNow,” however promising the landmarks of Emancipation Proclamation, the Reconstruction Amendments, the stirring oratory of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, and now, the rise of “Black Lives Matter” signs in my nearly all-white neighborhood.
By disposition, upbringing, education, and experience—not to mention age and vested interest in the status quo—I’m not a revolutionary. I’m an “Enlightened Incrementalist.” I’m all for constructive and necessary reform, just so it doesn’t rock the boat to the point of capsizing; doesn’t burn down the house we’re trying to repair; doesn’t kill the patient in the process of curing her; and so on. I know enough about the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution to know I won’t risk the return of the guillotine or red purges. If everyone would just calm down, take a deep breath, get a grip, return to “normal,” we could apply reason and patience and diplomacy, come together as a nation, and, well, reduce racial discrimination and end police brutality.
Uh-huh.
Tell that to black Americans who have been waiting on Enlightened Incrementalists like me for their entire lives and the lives of their parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and so on, all the way back to the failed project of Reconstruction. Tell that to the generations of black Americans who’ve heard white liberals from Hubert H. Humphrey to Walter Mondale to . . . dare I call Bill Clinton, who pushed 150,000 more police, a liberal? . . . to . . . dare I call stop-and-frisk Michael Bloomberg a liberal? . . . say, “Help is on the way!”
And then we have all the tone-deaf whites who’ve professed to be non-racists (“One of my best golfing buddies is black”) but remained woefully oblivious to the persistent legacy of the Original Sin. Worse, we have to this day, whites who are as aggressively opposed to lifting society’s knee from the neck of black America as they are against black NFL players putting their knees to the ground in silent protest.
If you are a white American—liberal, conservative, all-over-the-map, or “none of the above”—watch John Oliver’s recent episode on police brutality. Be sure to watch all 33 minutes of it, because the last minute is the most devastating. The last minute is not John Oliver. It’s a black woman. And for anyone who could possibly be dismissive of the episode up to the woman’s very last sentence—listen especially to that last sentence.
Then ask yourself, is this the time, the place, the juncture in our history to settle for “Enlightened Incrementalism”? Or when it comes to grappling with 400 years of injustice, is that term an oxymoron.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
