Esteban Whiteside
One hundred thousand people were dead and more were dying from a lethal virus when the president of the United States called for soldiers to march and bullets to fly in Minneapolis after George Floyd died under Derek Chauvin’s knee. Only the relentlessly clueless could have been surprised by the rage and anguish that lit the fires that erupted coast to coast.
Centuries of brutality against African Americans merely congealed in Minneapolis, a city with an inglorious history of police excesses like so many other American places marinating in white supremacy. The Chauvin arrest—his three partners who stood by watching Floyd die remain at liberty—did nothing to temper the anger and grief in the streets.
“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1781.
What Jefferson meant was, “No justice, no peace.”
As is his habit, the 45th member of Jefferson’s exclusive fraternity did not look to his predecessors for inspirational words to comfort his fellow Americans. He preferred to mock their unease and anger with the looting/shooting rhymes of a long-dead, racist police chief and tossed the matter to a Justice Department deeply complicit in scaling back the civil rights of African Americans.
Attorney General William Barr is “confident justice will be served.” African Americans are not: Welcome to the White House Terrordome, where every day that goes by confirms the hatred and anarchy that African Americans knew Donald Trump would unleash. He’s accomplished that beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Police in riot gear stand in front of the White House as demonstrators gather to protest the death of George Floyd, Saturday, May 30, 2020.
From his high perch, Trump practices the big lie, hones his authoritarian skills, and spews venom at people tethered to a lethal virus. Upholding a president’s oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States? That’s just a jumble of words he occasionally invokes while driving and twisting a knife in the back of American democracy.
Congressional Democrats have bet that deliverance from this nightmare will arrive via a victory at the polls in six months, brushing away the reams of evidence that their opponents have no interest in fair elections, or in holding elections at all. Republicans in Congress stand mute on Trump’s abuses, content to countenance 25th Amendment–level excesses so long as they help them keep their hold on power.
For the past several days, though, confronted by a murder, mass protests, and riots, Trump cronies speak in somber tones, befitting their high stations. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has said that hearings on Floyd’s death are “not a bad idea at all,” adding, “I don’t want to interfere with the investigation of the actual incident in question, but to take a 30,000 [foot] view of things, why does this happen, how often is it, is it an aberration?”
Perhaps Graham can be persuaded to save taxpayer dollars for coronavirus tests. Answers to his “why” question can be found—maybe a Senate staff member can highlight them for him—in the relevant portions of the 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, aka The Kerner Commission Report—such as this one:
Our investigation of the 1967 riot cities establishes that virtually every major episode of violence was foreshadowed by an accumulation of unresolved grievances and by widespread dissatisfaction among Negroes … The abrasive relationship between the police and the minority communities has been a major—and explosive—source of grievance, tension and disorder. The blame must be shared by the total society.
Prophetically, in 1990 rapper Intelligent Hoodlum, later known as Tragedy Khadafi, offered up these rhymes: “Black’s the mineral, white subliminal. Arrest the president, he’s the criminal.” Members of Congress who do not understand the roots of grievance of African Americans will not be enlightened by a new round of hearings into police killings, which will feature their colleagues posturing to express election-year outrage.
Instead, these willfully blind public servants must answer, as white America must answer, for this latest death of a black man in police custody, and take responsibility for the unapologetic bigot bundled off to the bunker of the White House Terrordome that he built.
Esteban Whiteside illustration left to right: Freddie Gray, Baltimore; Atatiana Jefferson, Fort Worth; Eric Garner, New York; Sandra Bland, Waller County, Texas; Tamir Rice, Cleveland; Michael Brown, Ferguson; Ahmaud Arbery, Glynn County, Georgia; John Crawford III, Beavercreek, Ohio; Breonna Taylor, Louisville, Kentucky; Philando Castile, Falcon Heights, Minnesota.
