America isn't breaking. It was already broken. By Andrew Gawthorpe // Why This Time Is Different. By Dahlia Lithwick
What many white
Americans are experiencing as a moment of acute crisis is just a sampling of
the chronic crisis of disease, economic hardship and state violence that shapes
the black experience in America. Black Americans have higher rates of chronic
illness and shockingly high rates of infant mortality. The median wealth
of a black household is just a tenth that of a white household... and one in every thousand
black men can expect to be killed by police over the course of their lifetime –
a rate 2.5 times that of white men
Each of these
tragedies affects black Americans uniquely, disproportionately. Any explanation
has to begin there, with the racial disparities and oppressions which divide
the nation – not only because they illustrate the failure of America to deliver
on its promise, not just because they fuel the unrest in the streets today, but
most of all because they sustain in power the forces which are continuing to
tear America further apart…. read more:
Journalists become the victims of police violence
Why This Time Is Different. By Dahlia Lithwick
Trump was never the cause of the problem; he is the result of the problem. As Bryan Stevenson explains (for the thousandth time), there is not one single thing about the death of George Floyd that is remarkable or new. Not the killing in plain sight, not the complicity of the officers on site, and not the fact that it was captured on video. “Everything we are seeing is a symptom of a larger disease,” Stevenson says. “We have never honestly addressed all the damage that was done during the two and a half centuries that we enslaved black people. The great evil of American slavery wasn’t the involuntary servitude; it was the fiction that black people aren’t as good as white people, and aren’t the equals of white people, and are less evolved, less human, less capable, less worthy, less deserving than white people.”
see also
Houston Police chief to Trump: Please, keep your mouth shut if you can't be constructive
Twitter shuts down white nationalist group posing as Antifa
Andrew Gawthorpe: America isn't breaking. It was already broken, these are just the symptoms: Look at America today
and you see a land defined by death. People are dying alone in hospital beds
and bedrooms. They’re dying in the streets. They’re dying inside as the economy
collapses around them and their hopes for tomorrow evaporate.
They’re dying because they can’t breathe.
Try to explain it all, much less cope with it – and our powers fail us. The reasons are too
numerous, the enemies too powerful. How does a nation deal, all at once, with a
deadly pandemic which its government is incompetent to protect it from; with an
economic collapse unlike anything in living memory – and perhaps anything in
modern history; with an explosion of rage on the streets, the fire sparked by
the murder of George
Floyd and the kindling heaped generously on top by centuries –centuries –
of white supremacy?
Journalists become the victims of police violence
Why This Time Is Different. By Dahlia Lithwick
Trump was never the cause of the problem; he is the result of the problem. As Bryan Stevenson explains (for the thousandth time), there is not one single thing about the death of George Floyd that is remarkable or new. Not the killing in plain sight, not the complicity of the officers on site, and not the fact that it was captured on video. “Everything we are seeing is a symptom of a larger disease,” Stevenson says. “We have never honestly addressed all the damage that was done during the two and a half centuries that we enslaved black people. The great evil of American slavery wasn’t the involuntary servitude; it was the fiction that black people aren’t as good as white people, and aren’t the equals of white people, and are less evolved, less human, less capable, less worthy, less deserving than white people.”
The killings of George Floyd or
Breonna Taylor or Ahmaud
Arbery all could have happened in the Obama administration. Killings
did happen then. The fact that the current president has praised Nazis and
given succor to white supremacists didn’t cause this week’s mass protests; it
merely coincides with them...read more:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/why-george-floyd-protests-are-different.htmlsee also
Twitter shuts down white nationalist group posing as Antifa
