Black Lives Matter

 Black Lives Matter

As noted by more than a few commentators, this nation has reached an inflection point on the crucial matter of race relations in this country.  The killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police officer, Derrick Chauvin, accompanied by the tacit support of three additional officers, was the precipitating event sparking the recent outrage that has spread to every state in this nation as well as throughout the world.  The clarion call of “black lives matters” has become a multiracial mandate, a demand not merely to repudiate police violence against African American men, women, and children, but to insist that this nation take seriously the problem of systemic racism, which has its roots in this nation’s colonial founding, with its persisting tentacles spread throughout this nation’s history, embedded within the Constitution itself, and only partially rectified by the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments. 

The egregious incident of this most recent barbarism brought to acute focus other black lives lost in the past several years—Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arberydue, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, and Trayvon Martin—through police and vigilante killings.  With this backdrop, the murderous assault of Officer Chauvin’s arrogant knee brutally imposed on George Floyd’s unprotected neck, has led to a wide majority of the US population to conclude that the incident was not an unfortunate isolated event, but symptomatic of an endemic racism (subtle or otherwise) underlying policing in America—one that requires immediate attention and perhaps radical restructuring of policing/community relations.  In this vision, the threat of and actual physical force would become one end of a broad continuum that involves a more extensive community engagement in social problem solving related to keeping and extending the peace. Moving toward this aspirational goal would include retraining of police forces and possibly structurally reforming the way that policing currently takes place, particularly in our large urban sectors.

The context for understanding these more recent killings cannot be separated from the decades and centuries of systematic violence perpetuated against black Americans by various levels of organized white groups and instuitions, especially since the end of the American Civil War, in the organization of the Klu Klux Klan and other hate groups obsessed with reinforcing white superiority in the officially segregated post-Reconstruction South, as well as in the more subtle, but no less pernicious North throughout the first sixty years of the twentieth century.  This history has included lynchings, race riots, bombings of Black Americans, including children, and assassinations of key leaders like Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King.  The decades long daily impact of the more subtle forms of racial discrimination in our urban sector and class warfare against the poor would take too long to document here.  But let me suggest that an acute analysis of the impact on housing, employment, education, and access to social services would provide a most disturbing narrative of the cumulative impact of poverty (see Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century U. S. History) on black and brown as well as well as poor white Americans.

This is not to ignore the recognition of progress in certain key areas related to both race and economic justice since the early 1960s, but it is to insist that the arc toward justice has been anything but upward in the past 50 years.  Moreover, in certain key respects, the arc has bent downward in recent decades, due in no small measure to the conservative revolution of the past 40 years and the corresponding institutional marginalization of the poor through a broad range of policies initiated by the political right.

On the refrain, “black lives matter” and the retort, “all lives matter,” I submit, simply because the latter is true (all lives are sacred), that black lives matter because they are threatened in a myriad of ways, particularly black males, by a very small, but violent prone segment of police and citizen vigilantes reflective of a deep seated racism that has never been eradicated from our society.

To put this in a larger perspective, the vast majority of black social justice leaders place their work within a broader constituency of threatened racial and ethnic groups who know full well that the recitation, “black lives matter”—which has so much resonant social, cultural, and political power, at this time—is a profound shorthand for a more extensive call to justice and equity throughout our nation. 

To put this in technical terms, “black lives matters” is a synecdoche, “a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole” (Webster Dictionary), in this case, to convey something essential about the deep-rooted inequities and prejudices against minority groups throughout the nation.  Given the recent killings of black persons by citizen vigilantes and a very small number of police, supported, in certain municipalities, by a broader institutional culture that gives tacit consent to rogue cops, I submit that the “black lives matters” refrain is an incredibly powerful symbol. It is one that carries the motivating power to stimulate an interracial movement for social justice and reform to better address the profound inequities and the many forms of injustice that impede this nation to aspire to its better angels as embedded in our most cherished national creeds.  The symbol, “black lives matter,” is as potent as it is, because the living reality it conveys is central to its meaning.

Let us capitalize on this energy unleashed during these past two weeks for the shorter and longer haul and to find some creative ways to work toward the vision it inspires.

2020