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Unusual and Usual discrimination in America – George Floyd’s death.

June 7, 2020 By Karl Leave a Comment

  An upside down flag, a sign of distress, next to a burning building on Thursday, May 28, 2020, in Minneapolis.  AP /Cortez

Upside down flag, a sign of distress, next to a burning building May 28 Minneapolis.  AP /Cortez 20

My blogs and this website concern themselves in large part with unusual types of discrimination. So I write about the discrimnation in favor of wealthy, smart, or talented people. For example, the criminal justice system is biased towards many celebrities. They essentially get away with murder, as I explain in my forthcoming book, Privileged Killers.
But recent weeks have shown me that we must deal with the usual kinds of discrimination in the U.S.  And it’s not just the underprivileged being abused by the police who can be called for what they are in rare instances, privileged killers.
Nonwhites, in this fraught era of the Covid-19 virus, are teaching us whites that other kinds of racial  discrimination in America are still rampant centuries after the country’s era of slavery.
This business-as-usual kind of discrimination, combined with the virus and the economic hardship resulting from it, comprise a “perfect storm” for  America.
For that reason, I’m passing along Elie Mystal’s take on the racial situation in today’s blog. It’s written by a man who identifies as black, writes for the progressive mag The Nation, and is a proponent of nonviolence.
I’ll give equal time in my next blog to a moderate black man’s take.

“People Can Only Bear So Much Injustice Before Lashing Out.”

Unusual and usual discrimination.

Unusual and usual discrimination.

“As the media denounces the Minneapolis protesters, it’s worth remembering that it takes incredible strength to practice nonviolence in the face of murder and oppression.

I would never throw a rock at the police. I would never throw a brick through the window of a big-box store. I would never set fire to an office building. But I want to. I understand why some people do.

I know I am supposed to counsel nonviolence. I’m a 42-year-old man with a wife, two kids, and a mortgage; I’ve got a college degree and a law degree and a blue check mark on Twitter;

I know I am supposed to shun “rioters” and “looters” who allegedly cede the moral high ground of protests when they respond to tear gas and rubber bullets with stone and flame. But all people have a limit to the injustice they can bear before lashing out.

The second day of protests in Minneapolis over the death of George Floyd erupted into violence last night. I understand why. And I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.

Put yourself in the position of a relatively conscious black person in America just since this past March. Black people have seen a pandemic disproportionately rip through their communities while the media continually runs live press conferences of a racist president lying about the disease.

We’ve seen layoffs and unemployment ravage our communities while Congress funnels billions of dollars to white-owned businesses.

We’ve seen white people absolutely lose their minds, waving guns and Confederate flags at police officers, pushing them into lakes and gathering in large groups without consequence while we’ve seen police literally sit on black people for allegedly violating social distancing orders.

And then the stories of the killings started. In the past three weeks: Ahmaud Arbery was lynched, on video. Breonna Taylor was killed by police in her own bed, offscreen. And George Floyd was choked out on the street in broad daylight by police while strangers literally begged for his life.

Imagine you’ve been black this whole time and watched all of this happen and you show up to protest and, instead of being met with docile, restrained police that the white Confederates get, you are confronted by police in full riot gear who use tear gas and rubber bullets to control your crowd.

And then you see a rock. And then you see an unguarded white-owned business. And then you see a match.

The fact that most black people do not pick up the rock in that situation is a miracle. The fact that the overwhelming majority of black people respond to the violence and terrorism practiced against us with words and songs instead of rocks and bricks is altogether supernatural.

America should be thankful black and brown people respond to state-sponsored violence with nonviolence.

In other parts of the world, the injustice regularly practiced by the white American paramilitary forces known as the local police would be met with IEDs and guerrilla war tactics.

Here, black people take to the streets, and almost all of us do so nonviolently. America is the luckiest place on earth.

People need to understand and remember that nonviolence is a choice.

A Haitian.

I’m Haitian by ancestry. That’s relevant because, as any person of Haitian ancestry will happily tell you, Haiti had the only successful slave revolt in the Western Hemisphere, and freedom wasn’t achieved nonviolently. I think my heritage makes me acutely aware that nonviolence is but one option among many.

Everybody talks like T’Challa when white people are listening, but Killmonger was right, at least partially. There are multiple ways to be a Black Panther.

Nonviolence and Unusual and Usual discrimination.

  • It takes incredible strength to practice nonviolence in the face of murder and oppression.
  • It takes incredible, nearly irrational faith that the long arc of history will bend toward the cause of justice.
  • I’m not Jesus, and I’m not Martin Luther King Jr.; turning the other cheek does not come naturally to me. It doesn’t even seem logical most of the time.
  • Until you’ve participated in a primarily black protest, you don’t really know how naked, how exposed, nonviolence feels.
  • Until you’ve heard the rumor ripple through the crowd that the cops are planning to open fire, you haven’t really thought about what nonviolence means.

You don’t know how foolish it feels to be out there, unarmed, protesting police who you know are authorized to kill you.

My experience.

The only one of those protests I’ve been to was after the murder of Sean Bell in New York City. And the protests around his murder didn’t even get that hot.

But I learned then that street-level activism was not going to be my thing. Being an effective black protester against white violence takes restraint. That’s actually the most important skill.

It would be a lot easier to show up, take a bucket of rocks, and throw them at enemies. Anybody can do that. It’s natural to do that. But going out there knowing that violence can be done upon you while you are defenseless takes a kind of courage I do not have.

On top of all that, nonviolent black protesters know for an absolute fact that their strength and courage will be ignored by the white media, the very people whose attention they are trying to get, if even one knucklehead does something “violent.”

I am clever with words. I can make a bomb-ass placard. But I also know that I could stand outside for hours dropping verses like Lin-Manuel Hamilton and the camera would ignore me if two brothers jacked a television from Target.

The Media.

The camera likes fire. It likes blood. It is attracted to the violence. Sometimes people throw rocks because throwing rocks feels like the only thing white people even notice.

Unusual and usual discrimination.

Unusual and usual discrimination.

 

 

Elie Mystal

The press incentivizes violence, the rage inspires violence, and the instinct toward self-preservation makes violence seem smart and justified.

So I choose to praise those who protest nonviolently, instead of decrying those who do not. The restraint shown by black people all across this country is admirable.

  • We are being terrorized.
  • We are being traumatized.
  • We are being hunted by cops who can kill us out in the open,
  • and when we gather to complain, those cops use violent tactics to scare us and hurt us and disperse us.And still, almost all of us use our words instead of our fists.

This country could be on fire almost every night in almost every city. It’s not, because most black people in this country choose to exercise tremendous restraint.

Most black people are still willing to talk this out. Most black people have the courage and fortitude to withstand the violence done against us without lowering ourselves to the level of an American police officer.

America should be more thankful for that. And it should remember that it’s a choice.”

Unusual and usual discrimination.

I’ll leave you with a few stark questions for those of us with white privilege. These come fom a social media post that shows the unusual discrimination experienced by the underprivileged in America.

I have privilege as a White person because I can do all of these things without thinking twice about it…
I can go jogging (#AmaudArbery).
I can walk from the corner store (#MikeBrown).
I can play cops and robbers (#TamirRice).
I can go to church (#Charleston9).
I can walk home with Skittles (#TrayvonMartin).
I can ask someone to put a leash on their dog when it is required in the public park we are in (#ChristianCooper).
I CAN BE ARRESTED WITHOUT THE FEAR OF BEING MURDERED. #GeorgeFloyd

White privilege is real.
If you’re white, please take a minute to consider a Black person’s experience today. Let me know what you come up with.

To learn about CLEFT HEART: Chasing Normal, click the Amazon or Barnes & Noble buttons in the margins. Or click the image of the book cover. My coming-of-age memoir has intertwining love stories, mystery, tragedy, and triumph.

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