Here’s the thing. Every person of color knows that it could happen to him, to her son, to his father, to their friend. Without exception, because they know the litany of names. George Floyd is just one more name added to the list the runs from Ahmaud Arbery back through Amadou Diallo to Rodney King, from Walter Scott to Dread Scott and on and on and on all the way back to 1619.
There’s a reason the NAACP flew their famous flag over 5th Avenue in New York City frequently from 1920-1938. “A black man was lynched yesterday” has been too often the simple truth in American life.
Unless you feel that in the bones beneath your skin then it may be simply impossible to understand fully the depth of Martin Luther King’s assertion that “a riot is the language of the unheard.”
White America suffers hearing loss when it comes to the cries of people of color. The best test of this aspect of our collective audiology is to assert that black lives matter. Speak that phrase, click the stopwatch, and see how quickly some white person will respond with “all lives matter.”
But, of course, that has never been true, and it is certainly not true now. Take a cursory glance at the death toll in the United States from Covid-19 and you’ll see which lives matter. For no biological reason, people of color are disproportionately more likely to die in the U.S. during this pandemic than are white folks. As NPR reported this morning:
· Nationally, African-American deaths from COVID-19 are nearly two times greater than would be expected based on their share of the population. In four states, the rate is three or more times greater.
· In 42 states plus Washington D.C., Hispanics/Latinos make up a greater share of confirmed cases than their share of the population. In eight states, it's more than four times greater.
· White deaths from COVID-19 are lower than their share of the population in 37 states and the District of Columbia.
There are various reasons for this: access to health care now and prior to the pandemic, neighborhood and housing situations, overall health (related to the first two points), and so on.
One that’s stood out to me for months now is the simple fact that while my household has continued to work straight through the pandemic in jobs that we can manage from the safety of home, almost every one of the workers staffing the grocery stores we’ve been to or delivering food and other items to our house since March has been a person of color – Latinx or African-American or, in the case of our mail carrier, an immigrant from Africa.
People of color are putting their lives on the line for the rest of us, and they are dying, and they know it. They are fed up.
All of that in the same context that we’re all experiencing full of anxiety and lacking in most all of the amenities that bring simple joys to our lives: games, live music, neighborhood bars or restaurants, gatherings with friends, worship in community, school, and all the rest of it. We are pent up.
When people are pent up and fed up eventually they are going to stand up and say, “no more.” The least the rest of us can do is stand in solidarity in whatever ways we can right now, and listen. Can we not hear?
It takes way more than this, of course. In the longer term, we have to come together in the struggle for a society that actually addresses the fundamental inequalities at the root of so much of the injustice that plagues us. In that work, as well, the first helpful gesture most of us people of pallor and privilege can make is to stay quiet and listen.
