Finally, Ain’t None of Us Can Breathe!
By Wayne Hare
Published on: Summit Daily and Pikes Peak Courier
For years I’ve been saying that if you peel back a layer or two of anything, you find racism. People usually just look at me with polite skepticism. And I get it. How to explain a racism that is so subtle and so ingrained that it became invisible to white people generations ago? When Washington politicians cut back on social welfare and safety net programs, it affects poor blacks more than any other group. Is this intentional racism? Or just an unacknowledged bias that comes from living and working in a city that is overwhelmingly poor black, leading legislators to believe that safety net programs affect not their own constituents, but only poor, lazy blacks? After all, in 2011 the DC black unemployment rate was almost 21% while the white unemployment rate was a mere 3.7 percent. What could account for that other than laziness? Those people don’t need safety nets, they just need to get to work!
Disaster recovery programs favor the wealthy - i.e. white - and come close to ignoring the poor – i.e. Black. They’re likely not set up that way intentionally “Let’s be sure that we screw over Black people after a hurricane!” Maybe it’s not malice aforethought, just the way the system is rigged.
Do cops start their shift intending to jack up a poor Black? Derek Chauvin who took a knee to George Floyd’s neck looked as nonchalant as if he merely had his foot on a cockroach. Did he even recognize that he was killing an actual human being? Or have Blacks been portrayed as sub-human for so long, or not a part of the “real America” that some whites simply accept it. Sarah Palin once exclaimed that “I believe that the best of America is in these small towns … what I call the real America…” She was likely envisioning an all-white town, not where Mr. Floyd was murdered. Certainly Mr. Floyd, or Breonna Taylor, or Amaud Amory were not ‘Real America’.
How many jokes compared the Obamas to monkeys? Beverly Whaling, mayor of Clay VA, referred to Michelle Obama as “… an ape in high heels.” An ape. Maybe Chauvin, instead of being a racist cop hell-bent on killing Black people, simply didn’t see Mr. Floyd as ‘people’, but some kind of an ape.
But racism is there. It’s everywhere. It was there when Jim Cooley, carried a loaded assault weapon into the Atlanta airport and simply went about his business, supposedly keeping his daughter safe. But when John Crawford, a Black man, was promptly shot dead when he picked up an air rifle that he was considering buying for his son in an Ohio Walmart.
It was there when Ronald Reagan announced his run for the presidency from the Philadelphia MS state fair – the same town where three civil rights workers were murdered by the local sheriff and others 16 years earlier.
It’s there when politicians use loaded code words, like “States' rights” to let white Americans know they’ve got their back.
American racism was there when the NFL conspired to deprive Colin Kaepernick of his livelihood because he placed his knee on the ground during the singing of the National Anthem – a song of freedom written by a virulent slave owner that nods to slavery in the third verse – to protest the exact police violence that later killed Mr. Floyd.
It was there before Derek Chauvin choked George Floyd to death in Minneapolis, when former NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo choked Eric Garner to death on the streets of Staten Island.
And it was there in Los Angeles in 1976 when Adolph Lyons, a Black 24 year old was pulled over for driving without a tail light, yanked from his car, handcuffed and choked. When he regained consciousness he was lying on the street, spitting up blood and dirt, gasping for air, and urinating and defecating in his pants. He was issued a traffic violation for a minor offense and released. But when his law suit reached the supreme court 7 years later, the court sided with the LAPD. An astonished and angry Thurgood Marshall wrote a dissenting opinion. “Although the city instructs its officers that the chokehold does not constitute deadly force, since 1975 no less than 16 persons have died following the use of a chokehold by an LAPD officer . Twelve have been Negro males…”
But now, the Coronavirus, which kills Americans who are inflicted with the dangerous pre-existing condition of being Black in America in far greater numbers than it kills white people without that pre-existing condition, combined with the murders of George and Breonna and Amaud has yanked back the covers of the ‘everywhereness’ of American Racism. Racism really is everywhere and white Americans are finally pissed off!
I sense that they are angry not only because of the injustices they see on video, but that they sense that the society and customs and institutions that maintain the hurt of racism, hurts them as well. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…where all men and woman are created equal…give me your tired, your poor, your huddled mases yearning to be free…I think white Americans are figuring out that THAT’s the country that they want to live in. Not THIS one. They’ve been gamed, and they’ve joined Black Americans in their anger. Finally, ain’t none of us can breathe.