Imagine: A Black police officer forces his knee onto the neck of a white man, in handcuffs, lying face down on the pavement. His knee keeps pressing down harder and harder for 8 minutes while the white man gasps and pleads that he cannot breathe, begs for air, calls his children’s names. Cell phone video of the violence goes viral.
Can you imagine that that Black man would not be in jail? Can you imagine that he would not even have been charged?
The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis has broken through even the numbing truth of 100,000 deaths from the virus.
I do not know what to write.
Should I tell you things you already know? That Black communities live in a police state today and that they have lived in a police state since those first slave patrols, through all of the lynchings, through Jim Crow and the new Jim Crow?
Should I remind you that it has been 66 years (May 17, 1954) since “separate but equal” was declared a lie and unconstitutional. Our schools are more segregated today than they were in 1954. Should I ask why you believe people of color should trust our system?
Should I ask why the “greatest democracy in the world” is obsessed with preventing people from voting? Whose votes are so threatening?
Should I point to the dramatically higher death rates from the virus among Black, Indigenous and People of Color ? Should I ask if our nation is willing to accept this level of death and rush to re-open, only because so many of those dying are people of color?
I don’t know what to write to you. I am a love preacher. I try to convince you, and myself, every week, that love is real and that hope is justified, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.
But I would be deceiving you, if I tried to pretend that each new murder does not threaten my own faith.
I am lightly touched by the violence of the police state in which we live, well protected by the many privileges I enjoy. But I know that it could so easily be me lying on that pavement with a white man’s knee pressing on my windpipe. Every Person of Color lives with that knowledge.
Should that white police officer be charged with murder? Just charged? Still innocent until proven guilty. The legal system will still be stacked in his favor. Can we not even charge him?
What I want to say to you is that even if he is charged, even if he is convicted, that will not justify hope. Because it will have taken a chance cell phone video and massive demonstrations to get even that to happen.
Do we really believe that we can magically begin re-shaping the structures of our world as it emerges from these Covid-days, when it takes so much to achieve so little justice?
I will not offer you a simplified and sanitized hope. The most I can offer you is an invitation…for those of you who are white-identified and even those who are Black, Indigenous and People of Color. An invitation to be present to the lack of hope.
Not an invitation to a pity party. Not an invitation to despair. An invitation to cease pretending.
The challenge is not to punish one white police officer in one city for one act of violence. We…that would be all of us…need to face the truth that so much of the structure of the world we know is built on a commitment to maintain the racial hierarchy. We must face it if we want to have any chance of changing it.
The words of prophet James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
We must face the truth. Be present to it. Visit the depression and the hopelessness. That is part of the truth I must know. That is part of the truth I invite you to know…in yourself if that truth is present in you…or through me and other People of Color, if that is as close to this truth as you can approach.
Let us, individually and together, face the truth. Name it. So that we do not remain in either denial or despair, but can emerge more certain of where our hope lies and more willing to move toward it.
Stay safe and stay strong.
Bill
P.S. The NAACP Portland Branch is holding a “Eulogy for Black America” Friday, May 29, at 11:30 a.m. in Terry Schrunk Plaza. They write, “We will be practicing social distancing, so if you’re going to be in attendance – please wear your masks and gloves. Also for those of you who would like to be there but cannot make it, we will be broadcasting live on our Facebook page: PDXNAACP.” Members of First Unitarian Portland will be there.