White Privilege is a threat to national security

By R. T. Andrews

Several thousand citizens assembled in downtown Cleveland Saturday afternoon, to protest the lynching of
George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis MN and to demand an end to systemic police misconduct
across the United States. • Photograph by Vince Robinson 

                                                                                                                            
The unforgettable video image of a Minneapolis police officer casually using his knee to take the life of the helpless black man pressed to the asphalt pavement beneath him, blithely indifferent to the pleas of both his victim and the helpless onlookers pleading vainly for him to stop, is perhaps the starkest distillation of white privilege imaginable.

Like the image of the naked Vietnamese girl running in unspeakable despair from the horrible destruction behind her, the image of Derek Chauvin officer executing George Floyd next to a squad car with eponymous license plate declaring the state’s power, will come — in its cold indifference to black life – to symbolize how America treats its citizens of color.

This was no faded black and white tableau of a Ku Klux Klan lynching carried out by hooded terrorists in the dead of night in the back woods of the Deep South a century ago.

This was no fit of rage by a squad of enraged cops with an expected sense of privacy and immunity as they brutally stomped Rodney King for his aggravating behavior.

This wasn’t an untrained, unstable rookie cop rolling up precipitously on Tamir Rice, a 12 year old boy playing with a toy pistol, and shooting him dead within two seconds.

This wasn’t the South Carolina cop expecting to get away with killing middle aged Walter Scott after shooting him in the back by planting a phantom gun by the corpse and telling official lies about what happened.

This wasn’t vigilantes killing Skittles-eating teenager Trayvon Martin on a rainy night in a gated community. It wasn’t self-appointed auxiliary cops pursuing and confronting an unarmed black jogger before killing him.

It wasn’t Louisville Kentucky police officers breaking into Breonna Taylor’s apartment under color of a wrongly executed “no knock” warrant and killing her as she slept.

This wasn’t the FBI bursting in on Fred Hampton and assassinating him in a hail of bullets in furtherance of a rogue government COINTELPRO operation.

This was worse in its unapologetic and unequivocal callousness. In broad daylight, in a showplace middle American city of Protestant prosperity, with a chorus of accomplices, and before a horrified audience, Officer Devon Chauvin conducted a public lynching.

It’s a mistake to call Chauvin, who along with three other policemen was fired from the force the next day, a bad apple. That is the system’s way of protecting itself, providing an illusion of self-discipline: cast aside a replaceable part and keep rolling.

If Chauvin were a bad apple, we’d have to look not at the branch or the tree or the grove that produced him. We’d have to recognize that the American orchard of justice sits on toxic ground, its soil poisoned by underground waters that a racist society that glorifies violence.

In killing George Floyd so publicly, so slowly, and so inexorably, Chauvin and his colleagues catalyzed an immediate and undeniable recognition among millions of white Americans that this systemic violence is being done in their names. He showed what policing in the black community truly is: the random brutality that reflects this society’s appraisals of black life as cheap.

As heinous, horrible and in-your-face as it was, if these were normal times the lynching of George Floyd might still have outlasted the normal news cycle such atrocities typically receive.

But these are not normal times. We have not enjoyed normal times since 2008, the year Barack Obama won the presidency.

Election of the nation’s first black president did not signal the dawn of a post racial America. Instead, it unleashed in America a reaction that is spiritual heir to the Redemption of the 1870s and the Massive Resistance of the 1950s and Sixties. Those movements put craters in the nation’s path towards a fairer and more open and just society that still impede our progress.

Redemption and Massive Resistance [to the mandate and logic of the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education] were largely centered in the South. The North acquiesced in the Redemption and was indifferent to the Resistance.

The nation is now rapidly moving to a choice point where acquiescence or indifference may prove fatal to our experiment in democracy. The death of that experiment clearly does not matter to our  current President. It seems to matter less every day to his party.

The rest of us will have to decide soon where we stand. November will be here soon. A wrong choice may bring our experiment to a permanent December.