So a few nights ago I turn on my TV and as usual, America was going batshit. People across the country protesting police brutality and systemic racism. I watched about 30 seconds of it and then thought I needed a night off; I was worn out with conflict and people yelling at each other and discouraged about the prospect of writing about it.
Did I really need to have an opinion on everything?
But later I heard Doug Glanville – a former big league ballplayer – talk about racism and say “silence is a position” which unfortunately made a lot of sense to me.
Next, I saw a Facebook post by a friend with a quote from Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel: “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
I felt like Al Pacino in Godfather III: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” (Although to my credit, I did it without overacting or chewing any scenery.)
I didn’t feel like writing yet another piece about what’s going on in America, but maybe I needed to and here’s part of why I felt that way.
In my opinion Dave Chappelle is a better stand-up than Jerry Seinfeld because Dave takes more risks. Dave talks about uncomfortable stuff like race and sexual identity and Jerry will give you seven minutes on pop tarts.
If you have a platform, how do you use it?
And that brings us – as it so often does – to Nazi Germany.
(Hey, I’m a liberal…I can’t go a week without comparing someone to Adolf Hitler. As conservatives have long suspected, it’s in the Liberal Oath which everyone on this side of the political line is required to sign. We also have to pretend to like kale and eat free-range chicken, but that’s a different subject and I can barely deal with the one at hand.)
American hypocrisy
If I haven’t pissed you off yet, this should do the trick.
The Elie Wiesel quote made me think about Nazi Germany and how smugly judgmental we Americans could get about “good Germans” who had to know something was rotten in Denmark or at least Auschwitz or Dachau and didn’t speak up.
“Why didn’t somebody say something?”
When our fellow human beings are being mistreated, don’t we have a moral obligation to object?
Well, white Americans have known black Americans have been treated like crap for centuries and a lot of us were willing to ignore it or even feel bad about it, but take no action. We quote the “All men are created equal” line and then ignore the fact that the guy who wrote it owned slaves.
But apparently the generation the Baby Boomers raised believed our bullshit about the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave and are now asking us to live up to what we profess to believe.
Really inconvenient, but they have a point.
If you’re currently thinking there are only a few bad apples in the police force and there’s no need to change the way we do things, try this:
According to the Chicago Reporter, the city of Chicago spent more than $113 million in police misconduct lawsuits in 2018 alone. The same article says the over the past eight years, the total tab for police misconduct is well over half a billion dollars and the city paid out on lawsuits once every two days on average.
If you want more details, here’s the link:
Clearly, George Floyd is not an isolated case; the protesters are right – we have a problem.
Pop pops off
I dig San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich because he’s smart, funny and isn’t afraid to call bullshit. Pop is famous for his interviews: if a reporter asks a stupid question, Pop might ask, “So you sat there all night and this is the best you could come up with?’
Now here’s some of what Popovich – a guy who has spent much of his adult life around black athletes – had to say about George Floyd’s death and subsequent events:
"In a strange, counterintuitive sort of way, the best teaching moment of this recent tragedy, I think, was the look on the officer's face."
"For white people to see how nonchalant, how casual, just how everyday-going-about-his job, so much so that he could just put his left hand in his pocket, wriggle his knee around a little bit to teach this person some sort of a lesson -- and that it was his right and his duty to do it, in his mind.”
"I don't know. ... I think I'm just embarrassed as a white person to know that that can happen. To actually watch a lynching. We've all seen books, and you look in the books and you see black people hanging off of trees. And you ... are amazed. But we just saw it again. I never thought I'd see that, with my own eyes, in real time."
Popovich said also said it was time for white people to stand up and lead the charge for change.
"We have to do it. Black people have been shouldering this burden for 400 years."
"The only reason this nation has made the progress it has is because of the persistence, patience and effort of black people. The history of our nation from the very beginning in many ways was a lie, and we continue to this day, mostly black and brown people, to try to make that lie a truth so that it is no longer a lie. And those rights and privileges are enjoyed by people of color, just like we enjoy them. So it's got to be us, in my opinion, that speak truth to power and call it out, no matter what the consequences. We have to speak. We have to not let anything go."
“It's easy for people to let things go, because it doesn't involve them."
Damn…don’t you hate it when somebody else is inconveniently right?
Some people can’t take a night off from racism
So while I was thinking about all this it occurred to me that the only reason I could “take a night off from racism” was because I’m white.
If I was any whiter, I’d be clear.
But what if I couldn’t drive a car in the wrong neighborhood, walk down the wrong street or shop in the wrong store without having to think about race? What if racism was shoved down my throat every day? What if there were no nights off?
So while I’m tired of all this conflict, I’m guessing black Americans are way more tired of it than I am.
Taking a night off from racism is a luxury they can’t afford.
In the first version of this I wrote "Charles Floyd" when I meant "George Floyd." No idea why I got that brain cramp, but I did.
Every human is a racist. Now follow the power.