“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” – Fannie Lou Hamer
The police killing of George Floyd is a nail in the coffin of racism. The violence that has come as a result is beyond the knee on his neck. His death is very much akin to the killing of Emmett Till, which was the precursor of the Civil Rights Movement.
We exist in a different age, the age of man on the street with Facebook video. The video of the policeman’s knee in Floyd’s neck is terrifying. The policeman with his knee in his neck appeared to have been enjoying Floyd’s begging and suffering.
The three other police standing by seemed absolutely absent. Without a doubt, it was a senseless killing, totally not necessary and a case that Mickey Mouse could win in a court of law. The Facebook video tells it all. It was an act of terrorism that had the psychological dynamics of a lynching.
This video is painful to watch; it is cruel, and if you are a history buff, it conjures up lynchings of years past, where white families went after church on a picnic and watched a Black, usually a Black male, being hung from a tree and/or burned.
This seems to have been white delight, as they sent out legal U.S. postcards about the events. Pain and more pain is the way it looks and the whites seems to have enjoyed the murder and perhaps the burning and dismemberment of body parts.
White Fear
There is a fear of the Black male by whites. This is an American reality. Why that is, is a real question for white males to answer. Black people, all of us, fear the white policeman in most circumstances. White women use the forever tried and true tactic of calling the policeman out fear of the Black male, either real, or made up. White women scream rape, and it still works in 2020.
Racism in America is real and as American as apple pie. It is not over and for every generation it changes. And just when you think it changes, it changes for the worse, perhaps, not the better. It was an absolute fairy tale for white liberal writers to suggest that we live in a “post-racial society” after Black President Barack Obama served two terms in the White House.
The lady in New York’s Central Park sees a Black male, a bird watcher no less, and calls the police in terror because he asked her to leash her dog. Really, without any alarm whatsoever, the white woman in 2020 can still scream Black male cometh on a 911 call and get emergency action. The woman was fired from her job immediately.
And if you wonder why the riot, here’s why. These incidents happen too often. Whites, even when they have Black friends and maybe even are in an inter-racial marriage, will never know the pains and reality of racism that are normal situations for Blacks daily that we ignore and endure.
You may think you can educate out of Blackness, but you can’t. You think you may job out of it, but you can’t. If Barack Obama lost his bodyguards and walked the streets of Harlem, the South or West Sides of Chicago, Detroit and perhaps Mississippi, he would be subject to the same common Black male abuse that often occurs when stopped by the police.
Blacks go through common insults daily, in the grocery store, the elevator, driving, downtown shopping, traveling, high-end restaurants, and on and on. If you are Black of any skin tone, you feel the Black stare or the Black mistreatment. Bless you if you have been one to integrate a setting or situation.
The George Floyd case hits so hard not only because of its visibility, but because we all relate to it no matter who you are, no matter where you are, no matter your stride in life. You think, it could have been you or yours.
There is more to this case than meets the eye, I think. A Black male shopping is suspected of passing a counterfeit $20 bill, according to the first news reports. Anybody been to the store lately and you pay with a $20, $50 or $100 and the cashier holds it up to the light? Is this because I am Black, you wonder?
This is the crime of Mr. Floyd, who did not resist police contact. Then, as the reports keep on coming, we find that the policeman and Floyd worked at the same club, in security. Perhaps they knew each other. Floyd’s girlfriend is white; is this some type of “racial” situation?
The Floyd case touches your heart very much in the same vein as did the Laquan McDonald case in Chicago, where a young teen was shot 16 times by a policeman. When we, Black folks, read about these murders of young males from Emmett Till to George Floyd, the fear comes up. It could have been my son, my brother, my uncle, my relative, me.
Though there were protests and mass demonstrations, the only reason there was not a Chicago riot with Laquan was that his uncle, Rev. Marvin Hunter, spoke with an eloquent calm but determination to have the policeman tried for murder.
The protest did not turn violent, but it was fierce and conducted with strategic precision. It changed the face of Chicago politics and sent Mayor Rahm Emanuel packing as he covered up the case for his own personal political motives.
America suffers from structured racism, institutionalized racism, systemic racism. It is part of America’s cultural DNA. The Reverend Otis Moss Jr. says we have two pandemics; one is Covid-19 and the other is 1619.
That is the year Africans arrived as slaves in America. We have suffered racism ever since from rape, lynchings, Jim Crow, burning crosses, discrimination, Black Code Laws, poor education, on and on.
But this is a new racism in American that is modernized. Black folk have been marginalized in every aspect of American society. We are a people denied. There is a new element as we have Black government officials in place. Perhaps we will see real justice.
The Race War
The country has erupted with protest and violence in major cities tearing down the luxury stores, the neighborhoods, and the institutions. Nobody saw it coming specifically, but the rage has been brewing and waiting to explode like a bomb.
The policeman with the deathly knee now sits in jail for Floyd’s murder. He is jailed on third-degree murder charges and the legal process will take its course.
But the three other cops who did nothing to stop their colleague from kneeling on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, have not yet been arrested or charged. So the Black anger is explosive and understandable.
The young millennials and Generation Z crowd is different from the Civil Rights era non-violent marchers. The inter-racial crowd is angry. Everyone is pent up from the Covid-19 shelter in place orders that lasted for more than two months.
So these protesters do not acknowledge the civil rights strategies. Their anger strikes as they live the police walk daily in their lives. They are bold and move without fear as they burn the police station and the police cars. Their march is not fearful and seeks retribution.
Their protest has been invaded by anarchists who have entered the march promoting their own negative agendas. They are using the Black marcher, the Black protester, for their own gain. They are bringing claw hammers, bowling balls, and baseball bats to the march.
They are driving vans and arriving in cities with Molotov cocktails. They come for the purpose of destruction, to burn banks, downtown stores, and cars. They throw urine and excrement by the bottle on the policemen.
This is not the nature, the mode of protestors, as the anarchists try to create an all-out race war. This is yet another dimension to the marches. Downtown Chicago was very messed up Saturday night with 240 arrests and 20 policemen injured, including with broken bones.
The same thing occurred Sunday night on the South and West Sides as the city secured the downtown area. The police stood tall and professionally and didn’t take the bait of violence.
Mainstream media does not know how to cover this anger very well. They describe and discuss, but have to turn to Black professionals, the professor, the civil rights elders, the politicians, the lawyers, for understandable insight and perspective.
But this is not a minute or 90-second sound byte discussion, because the discussion is filled with historical commentary and the Black fear and the Black rage is uncovered.
CNN has covered this breaking news incident better than any other outlet. The arrest of their reporter, Omar Jimenez, is another blatant sign of the racism. While Jimenez was covering the incident live on the air, he was arrested and his press credentials were questioned.
Questioned because he was a Black man covering the riots. He was taken to jail as a Black man, not as a reporter, before he was eventually released. Cameraman Ken Bedford of ABC7-TV in Chicago was attacked by rioters as he covered the demise of a shopping mall at 75th and Stoney Island.
The white Minnesota governor, the white Minneapolis mayor and the Black Minneapolis police chief spoke to the case with discernment. However, Black Americans everywhere spoke to the abuse, the insult, the obvious lynching of the case.
We are looking to the end of racism, the abuse, the insult; the blood is coming to an end with resistance. The President of the United States says if you loot, we shoot and that he will send the military against the American people if the governors of the states do not begin to “dominate” the streets. It is shameful that he held a Bible as a photo opportunity as he provided modern-day racist, failed, out-of-control leadership.
His innuendos gave people the signal to kill. That is an order of permission for policemen to kill Black people, to shoot in the streets. We have not seen the likes of this kind of mass urban violence since 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated.
At this time of the corona pandemic crisis, we live in fear and with uncertainty. It is more than the spread of Covid-19. Black people at every level are sick and tired of racism and its ugly ways that displays itself every day.
This anger is real. It’s about the disparities, neglect, and denial. We cannot be romantic about racism at this time. It is time to be real.
The violence that has erupted all over America is saying enough and is a strike back. We can no longer be minorities, people of color. We are unapologetically Black people in America.
It is time for full citizenship, with rights and privileges and respect and education and position and wealth and full opportunity. It is time for America to live up to its creed.
