Getting Our Attention

Image: Dan Moretz, artist, media specialist, St. Joseph University, Philadelphia

It is an old, familiar and deeply painful pattern. People of color encounter armed assailants in broad daylight. Before their encounter is concluded, the persons of color will be robbed of their dignity, their rights and, far too often, their lives.

It is a disturbing scenario for anyone with a conscience and even a modicum of humanity. But what makes it worse is that their assailants are those the public has authorized to use force, including deadly force, ostensibly to protect us. These homicides (because that is what their death certificates will read) are committed under what we lawyers call “the color of law.”

The word “public” is collective. It includes all of us. In theory, all of us are entitled to be protected from harm by those we empower to use deadly force. In theory, all of us are entitled to justice in our dealings with the holders of power. But in fact, if we are being honest with ourselves, we know that justice in our society is parceled out on the basis of any number of arbitrary factors.

Chief among them is ethnicity.

The deaths of a young man shot while jogging on the residential streets of Georgia and another lying face down in the streets of Minneapolis, the life force draining from his slowly asphyxiating body as he pled for his life, is nothing new. Most of us have long since become desensitized to and cynical about such events that occur with far too much regularity in our violent, racist culture. 

But in the context of a pandemic, they have become the vortex of a furious storm of outrage that demands to be heard.

So what makes these atrocities different from those that came before?

What Makes This Different?

We have been told that the pandemic has made everything different. It has changed the way we live, the way we interact with one another, the way we even see one another. More importantly, it has provided us a mirror that reflects our Shadow as a people. And what we are seeing reflected there is deeply disturbing.

A major lesson of the pandemic is that lives of people of color are less valued than the economy. We have seen that in the indifference to the pandemic hot spots in prisons, where people of color are overrepresented among the inmates, many of them unable to be tested or treated once ill. 

We have seen it in the lack of on-site protections, medical leave and the use of coercive employment practices to keep human beings working in the slaughterhouses and packing and shipping hot spots regardless of the danger to the employees. These are industries where people of color, particularly immigrants, are forced to choose between exposure to a potentially deadly disease and loss of employment.

To add insult to injury, we have branded the work these people perform “essential.” That is clearly not reflected in the way we treat them. What is clear is that having hamburger for fast food chains is more essential to the corporate interests of a consumerist culture than insuring workers have safe working conditions and the ability to protect their families from a deadly disease.

This lesson is being taught on reservations, hotspots where indigenous people have been left to fend for themselves in the face of a killer virus. And we have seen it in the sudden rise in hate crimes against people of Asian descent as an incompetent administration desperate to divert attention from its abject failures to deal with the world’s worst outbreak of this pandemic have sought to project those failures onto China and Asians in general.

Finally, we have seen it when white governors of states like my own rush to reopen economies even before the numbers of new cases and deaths have subsided the 14 days all reputable health experts are insisting upon as a minimum standard to protect the general public. With consistent data demonstrating that the mortality rates among people of color outpace those who are white, it is clear who will bear the burden of such ill-advised decisions.

There are clear messages that emerge when all of these pieces are laid together into this mosaic of morbidity. The first is that profit is more important to the holders of power in this country than people. And the second is that the lives of people of color are less valuable than those lacking melanin.

We Cannot Afford Any More Blindness

My heart is saddened by the looting and destruction that has occurred in cities across the country. A raw, mindless response to wrong-doing with more wrong-doing does not result in justice. It simply digs the wound to the body politic that much deeper. Gandhi was right when he observed that the practice of an eye for an eye simply leaves the world that much blinder. In time of pandemic, we can ill afford any more blindness.

But I think the message this uprising is sending may be more pointed than that. It may actually be designed to help us finally see clearly.

If the pandemic has revealed to us that the lives of people of color are less valuable than the property interests of the holders of power and privilege in our culture, what could be a more effective way of getting their attention than hitting them where it counts.

Literally.

Our Framers were pretty clear that the inalienable natural rights they believed had been given to humanity by “nature’s God” occurred in a sequence of priority in which Life was the supreme value followed by Liberty and only then Property. Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of that prioritization. And when property has become the ultimate value at the expense of life and liberty, attacks on property become expectable - if not inevitable.

That does not make this violence justifiable. It simply makes it comprehensible.

Tell Me Something Better to Do

Reports of the uprising occurring across the nation this weekend contained a quote that bodes our careful attention. Max Bailey, a 22-year-old man of color, has recently graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He had come to the Colorado capital in Denver to protest the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a law enforcement agent.

As he stood in the street with other protesters, the driver of a black SUV charged into the crowd. Bailey initially avoided serious injury by jumping up on the hood of the car and then back down to the street. Then the driver made another swipe at Bailey hitting him with her car and running over his foot. Thus far there have been no arrests nor do we know the driver’s motivation in this vehicular assault.

Most of us would have been terrified and infuriated by such an encounter. But a bruised Bailey limping on a swollen foot, vowed to return the next day to continue protesting:

“If you can tell me something better for me to do –  if you can tell me a way that we could change the world without trying to make noise like that, then I’ll get out of the streets. If you can show me the path, I’ll get out of the streets,”

Whatever else you might want to say about that, it is a perfectly reasonable demand. Whether or not his intended audience has ears to hear is another story.  

One thing I am certain of. This righteous anger will not go away if we simply ignore it. More of the same attitudes and behaviors that created this crisis will not be “something better.” It will not change the world. And an attempt to simply return to a “normal” that fails to address the pathologies of the last incarnation of our society will not keep people out of our streets.  

Can we hear the cri de couer from the thousands of Max Baileys of all ethnicities in our streets this weekend? Can we hear their rejection of the deadly ideologies of profit over people and the racist valuing of lives by melanin content? Will we find the courage to look in the eyes at the reflection of ourselves and our culture that the COVID19 Mirror is providing us?

However we might answer those questions, I think at the very least that those who are not going to stop posing them may finally be getting our attention.

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering d not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

 © Harry Coverston, 2020

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