So it's been a year since George Floyd was murdered by a police officer, and many publications have gone out of their way to ask: Where are we now, and where should we go?
To that point: Are we any closer to eliminating the effects of racism? I wish I could say yes, but I doubt it. Black people are still getting killed by police, many of which under suspicious circumstances. It continues to be challenging, with qualified immunity, to bring police to their proper level of responsibility. Like much of the jurisprudence in this federalistic legal framework, it's a patchwork quilt, addressed on a case-by-case basis, which means that we have to wait for terrible things to fix instead of taking strides pro-actively.
The young white man who killed two people in Kenosha during the height of this business still hasn't stood trial yet. He proclaims his innocence. He is released despite a million dollars bond by a former Hollywood star who has taken the opposite tack from people like George Clooney and decided to go all-out in defense of reactionary, not merely conservative, causes.
Some Confederate statues have been taken down. Replacements haven't been built yet. But some of the most significant--like that of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the infamous 2017 march took place, and those of Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, carved into Stone Mountain, Georgia, during the World War I era, and much ballyhooed since--are being maintained with misplaced pride.
We know more about Black Lives Matter, but that phrase has turned into a rallying cry for reactionaries to automatically reject any calls for reconsideration of racial stereotypes. It cannot be enveloped into the political mainstream. Due to effective usage of innuendoes by people like ex-, any and all disruptions are often attached to it. It is relegated to the fringes.
But white supremacy, which is at the bottom of all this, seems to be gaining strength after January 6, along with guns and fierce talk. Power, and force, and the anger behind it, seem to be at the top of the agenda. Senate Republicans, one supposes, do not mind: They have just blocked any bipartisan inquiry of the insurrection. Among other things, they seem to want to dodge attachment to radicalism and white supremacy, or perhaps to attach them in subtler ways, as if that was possible.
Too late. I may be going out on a limb here, but to this point, not one media source on either side has located a Democrat among the insurrectionists; Fox or Newsmax or One America News would certainly have located, and called out, one by now. And at least one Capitol police officer of color was exposed to racist commentary as he was assaulted there. "Is this America?" he said.
Yes, sadly, it is. It isn't new, either. The attitudes sure aren't new, though. The newness is the blatancy with which racism is declared and established.
You could say, too, that the defiance and protests supporting people of color have also increased, and that resistance, those of the white supremacists, has by nature followed. Yes, by nature: America is full of countervailing forces, and those two are at, or near, the top of our dynamics.
"We have never been one country," said one pundit the other day, and while that may be a bit strong, I would follow by saying what I've said since I've lived in our capitol for a year during the last decade and seen it myself in microcosm: We are too big now. There is too much fraying at the edges. We cannot handle diversity, looming though it may. It should be a strength, but far too many people have been swallowed up by pointless fear, and have been literally led to believe that it is harmful.
There are no encompassing ideas that will settle us into consensus. Maybe there never were, and our contrary illusions have been blasted away. Ex-, alone, cannot be blamed. He just did a better job of congealing attitudes than others have. What seemed like the legitimacy and effectiveness of anger did the rest.
George Floyd's murder did move the needle of awareness a bit, like that of Emmitt Till in the 1950s, the demonstrations and militancy of the 1960s, and the desegregation of the 1970s, until Reagan ripped the legs out from under and we've struggled to maintain some semblance of focus ever since. Yes, we became 'woke' in the past few years; we could hardly have done otherwise. But we also woke up to a renewal of racist underpinning, of hate, of mindlessness.
We remain, for now, in an oasis of decency and relative calm, with Joe Biden trying his best to stay on course. But with the displays of outright cowardice by Republicans who think nothing of the country but only of themselves, that time is wearing thin.
You can feel the anger growing again, can't you? And more absurdity: Marjorie Taylor Greene, the recount in Arizona, ridiculousness disguised as legitimacy. What we need--a better minimum wage, fixing a crumbling infrastructure, seeing to cybersecurity--are being drowned out. Once again: Failure to address these screaming needs is not conservatism. It is reactionism. It is a mindless attempt to replace the past with the past. It is an effort to avoid consensus.
It is irrational and obsessive to stop the changes we need. We 'woke,' but so many of us want us to go back to sleep. That can't happen now, though. Too much of this has to go somewhere. Where it emerges no one can know.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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