My heart is aching from just watching a moment by moment video of the police assassination of Raychard Brooks, 27 year old father of 3, who is black. Since George Floyd was lynched*, I have been to two marches and numerous vigils for Black Lives Matter. Many newly aware white people and youth have been to those same protests, but the deaths keep happening. Two trans black women were killed, maybe not by police, but by our racist police culture. Then two black men were found hanging from trees in rural California. Suicides? Why should anyone believe that story?
As if by answer, after I wrote this piece, there were reports of five nooses in trees in Oakland, and of a 17 year old hung in a playground in Spring, Texas, and of a Latino hung in Houston on June 15.
It seems that depravity, like racism, is inbred in America. I understand Langston Hughes when he says “America never was America to me.” It is amazing that any black person could emerge from slavery and all the Jim Crow laws after it with any love for America. I loved America until I found out what it had been doing to Latin America since - I don’t know - since taking a huge chunk of Mexico that lay North of the Rio Grande in 1848? Since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823? I couldn’t love a country that was using its power to take land and life from other countries.
I was 22 when I got a scholarship to study in Argentina. I started to meet students who spoke about “Yankee Imperialism.” I thought they were crazy, thanks to my American, middle class, college education. So I took my naïve self to the American Embassy to do some research. The Embassy opened its library and even its social circle to me until I learned that what the students were saying was true. My new education was hurried along by news of the Cuban revolution and how it was throwing off the yoke of U.S. domination. Cuba was taking America’s knee off of its neck.
That knee. The same one that killed George Floyd, and Raychard Brooks, and Breonna Taylor, and, and, and. It’s a wonder that anyone who wants justice has any hope at all. A line from Maya Angelou says, “when the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate,” and I wonder will the curtain ever fall? ( I had to look up “minstrel show” because I am white. It was a popular form of entertainment for white audiences with white actors in blackface denigrating black people.) But I didn’t need to know the definition to know that Maya was a strong, proud, black woman who saw the world through eyes that could see every assault on black bodies. She could see all that and still create beauty. Next to that kind of creative resistance, that I also observe in Palestine, I feel incomplete, like I am missing a gene for hope.
The other day Angela Davis said that the current uprising is qualitatively different from the explosive protests of 1968 when King was killed. Angela has a long view, a lived view, so she may be right. I will borrow hope from her and let that hope take me into the streets to support Black Lives Matter. I didn’t think America had it in her to stay in the streets. If she does, then I’ll take her back. In fact, I’ll do my part. I’ll ask you to be in the streets with me to see if we can bring down that curtain on the minstrel show of hate. The next time a black or brown person dies of this hate, I will try to remember them as a martyr to the cause of racial justice. Like George Floyd gave his life so we can be free. Martyrs in a nonviolent army for freedom.
Most times it looks like this army won’t win, but maybe it can, because finally there might be enough white Americans in the streets with them. Please, don’t stay home. I would liketo love America, would like to have hope enough to see America’s birth in genocide and enslavement finally undone. It isour only hope. It is my hope.
*Lynching is "murder without legal approval," not just by hanging.
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