JUNE 26, 2021 – While listening to the radio broadcast of yesterday’s sentencing hearing in the murder case of George Floyd, Jr., I recalled the horror of his death and the aftermath—the rioting, burning, and looting, some of it unnervingly close to our own neighborhood. Hopeful souls say, “His life mattered,” and truly, it did, but what did the nation learn from this sordid ordeal? In NYC, a George Floyd memorial was vandalized. Obsessed with the “lawless” protests that ensued after the killing, most Republicans remain fixated on “law and order” and protecting their prosperity, oblivious to the glaring disparities between whites and Black in this country.
Worse, we learn from The Wall Street Journal reporter, Michael Bender, that You-Know-Who was even more dangerously clueless than we’d feared. (See his newly published book, We Did Win the Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.) “Crack their skulls!” The mad man ranted, directing his rage at Black Live Matter protesters. And “f _ _ _ _ _ _ shoot them!” the Commander-in-Chief with zero redeeming human qualities yelled at “his” military.
We remain stuck in a mode in which all too many white people define “racism” as “harboring bad personal feelings toward a Black person—even the Black doctor who’s a member of my country club and the Black lawyer who rides in my elevator.” No, I’m sorry, the absence of animus toward “good” Blacks doesn’t get you off the “racist hook.” Systemic, institutionalized racism in this country is baked into our history, our culture, our politics, our economy, our zip codes—so deeply as to render America racist since its inception as a Euro-Caucasian-dominant society. There’s just no getting around this reality.
If whites cannot learn to acknowledge our country’s inherent racism—the consequence of centuries of bigotry and exploitation—then we are doomed to labor under the perpetual tax on our true potential. If our course remains fundamentally unaltered, eventually that tax will become confiscatory of the “American Dream”—even for whites. Demographic trends will overwhelm the rigid myopia of defiant whites. If in that process Blacks were to become remotely as vengeful as segregationists were in the South in my lifetime, whites will have reason to run and hide.
Yesterday, a bad, villified cop at the tip of the spear of systemic racism was sentenced to prison for 22.5 years. The rest of us who’ve unwittingly benefitted from an entire order—including our Constitution—built on racism . . . went Scot free.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
