Reading this sad news (and not wishing to be too, too inflammatory) I thought this headline might serve as a kind of summary of rotten state of race relations in the United States--for the past century or two. Black lives still don't matter, enough, so much so that there is a counter movement, All Lives Matter, embodied by the 'new' white supremacy that resents having given Obama, a black man, a chance--and is courted by the current American president who traffics in such division and hate.
Predictably, there were protests after this latest incident occurred (just a few hours ago) and it's not a stretch to imagine that the police officers may walk free, as others before him have, and that this will further inflame race issues and mutual mistrust. How far we are from Martin Luther King's Dream, 50 years after his assassination, and the lie that is being sold to us about living in a post-racial society.
Here's a rare interview with Dr. King where he confesses: My Dream Has Turned Into A Nightmare. It's sad to see how little has changed, since...
Racism and violence are difficult and complicated matters to untangle in the American psyche and, if you ask me, it's all connected. Why, we might ask for ourselves, is a war being waged in the streets of this country, with Israel Security Forces Training American Cops?! This is why, I believe, we should care as much about the wars fought on our streets, as those being fought in foreign lands.
Otherwise, if we think what we do in the larger world does not matter, we find ourselves confronted with gun violence at home, police brutality, the open wound of race relations, or the plaintive cry – as old as the creation of this nation – of Indigenous Americans at Standing Rock. Or physically and psychologically damaged war veterans, homelessness, uprootedness, refugees, ISIS – all terrorists in the shape of our shadows, all side-effects of the pandemic of indifference.
But, back to the issue at hand of Black Lives Mattering, a few words by Langston Hughes--poet, activist and leader of the Harlem Resistance (1920's)-- are in order:
Negroes
Sweet and docile,
Meek, humble, and kind:
Beware the day
They change their mind.
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
To read more about Hughes, please, visit The Academy of American Poets
(Image of protesters: Kevin Hagen/AP)