The pun is intentional. If you are part of a group of oppressed people defined as a race, no matter where in the world you may be, you know that the movement towards justice and equality is more of a painful crawl than a race, and that is true regardless of dramatic events that put an end to some of the unjust practices. I know I have said it before, but it bears repeating. What captured the hope and the imagination of the world was the promise of America's grand experiment rather than its reality:
“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
That assertion in our declaration of independence is the ideal; it is the dream of a just society. What keeps that dream alive is the never ending struggle of so many people of courage and faith who refuse to give up on turning that dream into a reality.
During the civil rights movement of the nineteen sixties and seventies I came to realize that as someone who was born into a racist society I was fed the poison of racism from the moment I began to learn our language. And so the struggle began between my adverse emotional reactions to the in your face civil disobedience of some civil rights protesters and the intellectual side of my brain that told me how wrong those emotional reactions were. Needless to say that I had to keep reminding myself of how I would react to the racism if I were black. My great hope at that time was that my generation would not afflict our children with the poison of racism. I think a majority of us really tried to avoid that, and we succeeded well enough to for us to elect a black man as our President. But while the election of Barack Obama showed how far we had come since Jim Crow, the reaction to his election also showed how far we have to go. The unabashed racists then and now are a large minority made more powerful by a majority of indifferently ignorant people who have to have the atrocities shown to them live and in color before they will accept the reality of how dangerous it is to be black in this country. The fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson Missouri was a horrible wake up call for me. Any person being killed by police using excessive force is disturbing, but it was particularly so in this instance. When the DOJ found that Ferguson depended on fines and other charges levied on black citizens by the police and the courts it revealed a scope of institutional racism I had never even imagined. The whole government of Ferguson was acting like the mob. The fact that Ferguson was using its police department to exploit and terrorize citizens who are black left no doubt in my mind that racism played a part the killing of Michael Brown!
I am sure there are people who will argue that Ferguson's extortion scheme is an aberration, but the video evidence showing the killing of so many unarmed black people by the police and by other white people in different sections of the country makes a wide spread and deadly racism impossible to deny or ignore. Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Ahmad Aubrey, Breona Taylor, George Floyd, and so many other black victims did not choose to martyr themselves. Like so many others they became martyrs simply because they were back. As the Black Lives Matter people say, “a black person is three times more likely than a white person is to be killed by the police.” This must stop. It is not enough for people like me to search our souls, we must commit ourselves to the cause of justice now. We must do what is necessary to end this carnage and the racism that makes the carnage possible!