APRIL 1, 2021 – As The Trial continued yesterday, the jury—the one in the courtroom and the one of public opinion—saw a cogent, composed eye-witness fall apart emotionally as he relived the traumatic scene; as he watched the replay of George Floyd, Jr. in distress. The witness happened to be an older Black man—his thick, white framed glasses starkly symbolic, I thought, of a Black person’s awareness of white power; the white tissues he used to wipe his tears away, a reminder of how white society ignores, obscures, justifies Black pain.
His recorded words included, “You can’t win!” They were directed at Floyd to stop his futile resistance.
“You can’t win!” Though spoken in the moment when the police were stuffing big, tall Floyd into the “cage car,” the words reverberated inside my mind long after they’d struck my ears. The phrase echoed more yesterday evening as I continued reading Taylor Branch’s biography of MLK and the Black struggle for Constitutional rights.
Later I watched a video made for Yom HaShoa by Ruth Oppenheim. She is the mother of a close, long-time friend, Jeff Oppenheim, who, with his sister Claudia, provided additional insights into the generational effects of Holocaust survival. In the video Ruth gave her eye-witness account of persecution, the horrors of Kristallnacht, and her family’s narrow escape. As I pondered the Holocaust, I was struck again by the Black man’s words, “You can’t win.”
I saw the parallels between Nazi persecution of Jews and the treatment of Blacks in this country. Enslavement of Blacks—first as chattel, later as “criminals”—is our “Holocaust.” Our refugees of terror and persecution were people of the Great Migration, who fled the Jim Crow South. Our concentration camps are state and federal prisons and permanently impoverished urban areas, surrounded by high walls of despair topped with mangled and dysfunctional infrastructure.
Granted, our Holocaust didn’t culminate in Himmlerian gas chambers and crematoria—after mass slaughter of helpless men, women, and children by machine-gun fire became too “inefficient.” Our lynchings were by ones and twos. Our death sentences, whether carried out on death row or in urban streets, are one-by-one—this being the land of rugged individualism amidst “states rights.” Our targets are mostly Black men, though Black women and children aren’t exempt or immune. But from our very national origins, we’ve piled great injustice upon our promising slogan of “liberty, freedom, and justice . . . for all.”
Inhumanity toward humanity is a human trait—here and everywhere, past and present. But that universal condition doesn’t absolve us Americans, and in fact, it threatens our survival. We need to acknowledge our history. We need to understand—for example—how police brutality grew out of the phrase “law and order,” which, in turn, was code for “Southern Strategy”—a political strategy advanced by Republicans and cultivated by Democrats to keep and garner white votes in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation.
We can’t remain chained to “You can’t win!” or we all will lose.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
