Thirty cities, they say. Thirty cities. Thirty cities burned from coast to coast. You can hear the tsk-tsking everywhere. You can see the heads shaking with disgust, with frustration, with deep disapproval — with despair. You can see the looks of confusion and horror, of dismay and doubt. Why would something like this happen? Why George Floyd? Why Derek Chauvin? Why here, of all places? Here in the "land of the free" and the "home of the brave"?
There are reasons for all of this, of course, but we claim not to know them. When they finally force us to look our racism in the face, we call them "unfair." "There are better ways to call attention to your plight," we homilize them. But we don't tell them exactly what that is because we've never done it.
As a result, the people we've kept down so they couldn't rise up, we condemn because they don't rise up. And so they did.
Now, we're really unhappy about that. We had nothing to do with this racism thing, we say, and we're not going to apologize for something that happened centuries ago.
But maybe we should think about that a little. After all, it's in our DNA. It's what we do. Generation after generation.
No, this generation didn't buy slaves to pick cotton. Instead, this generation underpaid them so they'd keep doing the servant work we don't want to do. Or we deny them decent places to live, making it all but impossible for them to get nice little brick homes, too. Or we elect a president who calls other races names and insults while the whole world looks on in horror as the mask of gentility drops from the face of a racist nation. Or we allow him to put their children in cages to show the world that we don't want "those kind of people" around us.
No doubt about it. We've done our share of racism while we blame it on the racist generations that went before us. Maybe just apologizing for our own sins against a people would be a start.
As Mayor Sam Liccardo of San Jose, California, said on CNN May 30, " How are we going to step up around questions of racial equity from plaguing us really for centuries?" Indeed. It erupts and we put it down. And it erupts again. And we put it down ... again and again and again.
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