Grassroots/Hank Kalet

An American Sickness

We always claim surprise. We always make excuses. We always blame the other. nnThis is our character. This is the American way.

As I write this, American cities are in revolt. The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer as three other officers watched was the precipitating incident. The spark that lit the pool of gasoline. Floyd was 46. He was a father, a truck driver, a bouncer. He died May 25 after “in police custody on Monday after a white police officer pushed his knee into his neck on the ground outside a supermarket in Minneapolis,” BuzzFeed News reported.

The murder was caught on video. Floyd, in obvious pain, kept repeating “I can’t breath” in an eerie echo of the 2014 murder of Eric Garner by New York police. The video went viral, setting off protests in Minneapolis, a city with a history of racial divisions. Protests elsewhere followed, many spilling into violence.

None of this should have been a surprise. Black men, and to a lesser extent black women, are disproportionately targeted by policing, which often is framed as a necessary response to crime. The increased contact then leads to greater tensions, as residents of these over-policed communities start to push back. Police, in many cases, have been taught to act as an occupying force, which alters the relationship between police and community, turns every encounter into a high-stakes arrest when violence could erupt.

Floyd was stopped for allegedly trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. He didn’t resist, according to accounts, and yet extreme force was used. Garner was stopped for selling loose cigarettes, Philando Castile was shot in his car as he was complying with officer’s orders, after being stopped because he may have resembled a robbery suspect. Botham Jean was killed in his own apartment in Dallas by a female police officer who mistakenly entered his apartment thinking it was hers.

For Black America, this has been a pattern. Martin Luther King listed it in his “I Have a Dream” speech among the grievances that needed addressing, one of the debts imposed on black America. James Baldwin wrote about it, describing policing in urban neighborhoods as an occupation.

But for White America, each incident occurs in a vacuum. Each incident is separate and distinct. Listen to the commentators and politicians as they decry the violence that has erupted. The protests are no longer about George Floyd, they say. The violence sullies his name. It is only this one murder, they think, only Floyd’s death that is of concern. Arrest the murdering officer and all should be well.

That misreads what is happening on the streets and, perhaps purposefully, perhaps subconsciously, breaks the continuum that links all of these deaths, and that connects the actions of police to the broader American culture and economy.

Breonna Taylor, an EMT in Louisville, was shot to death March 13 by officers during a no-knock raid by police, a dubious but legal practice. Her boyfriend was charged after he fired in self-defense, not knowing that the invaders were police officers, The no-knock raid, in this case, was authorized by warrant, and the courts have repeatedly upheld its use on the grounds that the element of surprise was needed to ensure that drug dealers do not have time to dump their stash. That the courts have signed on to such a blatant violation of the fourth amendment should not surprise anyone. The courts have often allowed for exceptions on emergency grounds, ignoring that the exceptions fast become the rule and that the exceptions rarely get applied evenly.

The no-knock raids are part of a larger set of tools used by what Radley Balko has described as the warrior cop, which include the expanded and unbridled use of SWAT teams, riot gear, military vehicles and weaponry. This makes all too much sense, given that we repeatedly tell officers they are engaged in a war — on crime, on drugs, on terror that almost always centers on the black community, and that is just one in a long laundry list of indignities imposed by the white majority.

That’s what I mean by a continuum. The protests and violence following George Floyd’s death occur with a very specific context that unmasks the white supremacy at the center of our culture and our economy. COVID-19 is infecting and killing more black and brown people than it is white people. It is doing so because of the way our healthcare system is structured and the way our economy is structured. Low-paid front-line workers — health aides, grocery clerks, delivery drivers, sanitation workers — are overwhelmingly black and Latino. Unlike their white counterparts, they cannot work from home and have been at the center of the health crisis from the beginning. In places like New York City, they travel back and forth to work on crowded buses and subways. They lack paid sick leave. They have lower-quality health care, both because access to doctors can be difficult and because their jobs may not offer health insurance.

They live in segregated neighborhoods with poor access to healthy food, often in older, badly maintained buildings. Wealth accumulation has been difficult, if not impossible for most, thanks to a history of redlining and predatory lending. Schools in many minority neighborhoods lack resources, are overcrowded, often are in disrepair. In Paterson, a working class, mostly Latino city in New Jersey, the school district had to take money from other school services during the pandemic to buy laptops, but still could not provide one to every student even as the district was attempting to educate students remotely. This is not the case in the wealthier suburbs.

The intersection of economic and racial inequality is not an accident. It is baked into the American economy and social order — into the very words of the US Constitution. We want to believe we are colorblind, but we are not and never have been.

What we are witnessing is something we should have expected, something we have witnessed before and that we will witness again and again until we own up to our racism, atone for our racism, address the dual cancers of racial and economic inequality.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Facebook.com/hank.kalet; Patreon/Newspoet41.

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2020

Populist.com