Finally, we have “proof.”
The heinous video that depicted the eight minutes it took for a white police officer to torture and kill a black man offers irrefutable proof that police brutality is endemic in America. The video depicting the killing of George Floyd proves that America suffers a dangerous and abiding racial divide.
The world’s eyes are now open to a reality that African Americans live every day. So many who have suffered unjustly at the hands of the police, in so many forms. We have been demeaned, humiliated, terrorized, murdered.
There were always excuses. Your word against ours. Caveats, legalities, victim-blaming.
After decades of cover-ups, denials and misdirection, the truth-telling video of the murder of George Floyd cannot be denied.
The proof that America is an inherently racist culture was always there.
“What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” the Kerner Commission concluded in 1988. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it,” the presidential panel reported.
Massive reams of data, studies, commentary and events have documented that communities of color are oppressed by structural and institutional racism. Yet, as the bodies and broken hearts piled up, this nation refused to acknowledge that black lives matter.
Now, some white people are inspired to respond. Mayors, governors, police leaders are taking a knee. My inbox is stuffed with statements from the heads of major corporations, non-profits, schools and other institutions offering words of “solidarity” with people of color. White marchers are flooding the streets to join their black brothers and sisters in protest.
They want to “listen.” They are calling for change, task forces, committees, lawsuits, and reforms.
I welcome that. But do they understand that America’s racist police culture is just one fatal tip of the racial iceberg? Can we, as a nation, acknowledge that racism is embedded in American culture? That this “great” country was founded on racism? That we plundered and murdered Native Americans to profit from their land? That our world-class economy was founded on the backs of black bodies stolen from Africa?
It continues. Last week a video emerged that showed police dragging a young black woman from her car and throwing her to the ground at Chicago’s Brickyard Mall. A white officer appeared to hold her down neck with his knee.
In Uptown, officers have been accused of beating protestors during a protest march. In Bridgeport, a neighborhood that bears a shameful racial history, bat-wielding thugs attacked people of color while police officers allegedly stood by.
Investigations are pending.
On Friday, Donald J. Trump took to the microphones to crow about new, encouraging U.S. unemployment numbers.
He took his victory lap in the name of George Floyd. “Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying there’s a great thing happening for our country,” the president of the United States said. “It’s a great day for him, it’s a great day for everybody.”
Trump’s America is not ready for change.
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Follow Laura S. Washington on Twitter @MediaDervish. She is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a political analyst for ABC 7-Chicago
