Earlier this week Trevor Noah posted on Instagram about how Amy Cooper “weaponized” racism, and how society isn’t holding up its end of the bargain in the social contract with blacks. In the comments feed, a troll threw shade at Noah for “race-baiting”. Which exposes just how vast the chasm is between what I perceive as rational and obvious truths and the cretins who are focused on the protests and looting and, IMHO, totally missing the fucking point. And it led me to fixate on this as the topic for this installment of the blog by selecting the cliche: “playing the race card.”

Today’s headlines show how out of touch much of white America is about what is going on here: “Minnesota governor says violent unrest is no longer in any way about the murder of George Floyd”.

But you know what? I beg to differ. I think it is about George Floyd. And Ahmaud Arbery. And Breonna Taylor. And a long list of black victims that you have seen circulating on Facebook that is just the tip of the iceberg, the “I have privilege as a white person because I can do all of these things” list, and worse, all the victims we don’t know about, who were abused and didn’t die. Those who suffered, but weren’t captured on a video that went viral.

In my mind, things wouldn’t have exploded the way they did this week if all the police officers involved in the most recent atrocity in Minneapolis had been arrested at the scene of the crime and brought up on appropriate charges.

Or if Ahmaud’s murderers had been arrested at the scene of the crime and brought up on appropriate charges. Immediately. Not months later.

Or if Freddie Gray’s killers had not been acquitted.

If Sandra Bland hadn’t been racially profiled in Texas and ended up dead in a jail cell three days later with the arresting officer cleared of all charges.

And if practically the exact same thing hadn’t already happened to Eric Garner. In New York City. Six years ago. “I can’t breathe.”

How is it possible another black man can be killed in eerily similar circumstances in the same eon or lifetime, let alone in the same generation?

And if Kapernek hadn’t been persecuted for trying to peacefully protest exactly this kind of violence against blacks and the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators. For taking a knee in the NFL, he was ostracized. Ironically, you could say he was blackballed.

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I just moved from Haiti, a nation that has been debilitated by civil unrest, and the attendant opportunistic looting that sadly tends to accompany riots and natural disasters, for the better part of two years (see the moving images of it captured by brave photographers, finalists for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize). If I have learned anything from this miserable set of circumstances, it’s that the violence will continue until the conditions that give rise to it change. What do the rioters, be they Haitian or American, have to lose? Specifically in America, what more can we take from African Americans when we strip them of their lives and humanity on a regular basis with little to no consequences for the abusers?

And we white Americans need to take a beat before we try to shift the narrative and take the moral high ground and start tsk-tsking when there is foreseeable and avoidable backlash to the latest outrage. I am not impressed with the negative reactions from upstanding citizens who are shocked at the wanton destruction of property and looting. This article Violence Never Works? Really? points out the hypocrisy of our recent and historical behavior that I hope will encourage silence, sympathy and empathy rather than judgment.

I do not condone or endorse the violence like this week’s that leads to more injury and death. But seriously, what do we expect? Shit happens during protests when police turn on the tear gas and rubber bullets. Muckrakers and low lifes infiltrate and take advantage of the situation out of desperation or to stir the pot like this gas-masked white guy agent provocateur who broke windows at Minneapolis Auto Zone.

And to the white people who are STILL responding with “all lives matter” I just want to say that they are at best tone deaf to the relentlessness of the injustice. I no longer feel like giving them the benefit of the doubt that they mean it in a kumbaya kind of way “to which no one could object.”

Given the abominable treatment of blacks in the Americas over the past 400 years and the modern day lynchings that are, astonishingly and shamefully, still happening now, it makes me want to get up in the grill of the all lives matter folks and ask them: “Have you no sense of decency?!?”  

“Because of the brutalizing and killing of black people at the hands of the police and the indifference of society in general and the criminal justice system in particular, it is important that we say that…”     

The above are the implicit words that precede Black Lives Matter per a law professor cited in this Vox article

There is very little that could get me to abandon isolation and physical distancing at the moment given my fear and respect for Covid 19, but if I was in the US right now, I think this would draw me out to the streets. Enough is enough.