“Every day is pervaded by racism, that hatred that lurks around the corner at all times.”
This sentence that Mayor Bill de Blasio uttered in a recent press briefing encapsulates why everything seems to be burning in a raging hellfire right now.
It also is the perfect sentence for me to use as a foundation for the argument I am building against this destructive paradigm.
The implication, by people that I am tempted to say want to see this country crumble, that America is at its core, a deeply racist country that actively attempts to quell black people from achieving greatness or is a place that wishes to see black people suffer is absolutely false.
That of course does not disqualify that there are racist people within America. It doesn’t cancel out the fact that there are racist police officers, or that police brutality is a problem that needs addressing. That doesn’t mean that horrible and racist things don’t happen to people who it shouldn’t have happened to.
But it means that we have to understand and clarify what it is we are fighting against. It is easy to get caught up in the anger that builds in your chest when watching the murder of George Floyd, as he suffocates under the unrestraining knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. But the critical step comes afterward- when we ask ourselves the question, where should we direct our anger?
Should it manifest in the shattered windows of small business owners, many of which are owned by black and brown folks or in the ashes of burned police precincts and patrol cars? Are we turning our ire at people who, at the very end of the day, want the same things as us?
So much of this issue is derived from ambiguous and unfalsifiable claims that not only add to the untruth, but create unnecessary fear and suspicion of one another. Crying institutional racism does not make you a hero. Saying that “the system” is out to get you gives you relief from explaining what you mean, but it certainly doesn’t give your opinion superiority or make it an absolute truth.
Yesterday, at the Zoom meeting of Councilmembers Brad Lander and Vanessa Gibson’s call to restore the $2.3 billion cuts from the $85.2 billion capital plan in the Fiscal Year City Budget now being hammered out, I encountered an example of this line of thinking that went uninterrupted.
Barika Williams, ANHD’s (Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development) Executive Director and one of the speakers at the meeting, commented on the cuts as being, “in many ways, a policy manifestation of what we talk about when we say the marginalization and disenfranchisement of black and immigrant communities across the country and especially in NY.”
Really? So your explanation for why a small percentage of cuts that have been made to the capital budget, after realizing that the American economy is suffering the worst economic plunge since the Great Depression is racism?
Really? New York State had a staggering $6 billion budget deficit before the Pandemic. The city is going to spend $3.5 billion by the end of this year in costs to fight COVID-19, our tax base has been decimated with store closings, wealthy people are moving out of the state because it has one of the highest progressive tax rates in the country, and we can boil all of it down to institutional racism?
Explaining why something has happened is a hard thing to do. I use this seemingly harmless example to show that making these ambiguous statements that have little grounding in reality, do nothing but add to the destructive narrative that racism must be out there in the ether, adding to the milieu that every obstacle in this country is due to some shadowy and nameless group that is out to get you simply because of the color of your skin.
Attribution matters. Ambiguity is the enemy of accountability, and we need accountability so we can stand on the same side and demand change. George Floyd should not have died. The way he was murdered was stomach-churning, and I’m insisting, right along with everyone else, that something like this never happen again. Maybe it’s police sensitivity training or more bystander interjections that don’t result in more arrests, I don’t know. But I will not partake in a march for the destruction of a country that is built upon the premise that every person be judged by his character on the basis of his individuality alone.
According to Mayor de Blasio, racism apparently permeates every corner of the country and according to the New York Times’ 1619 Project, it is in the very DNA of America.
But I don’t see inhabited corners in dark alleyways. I see streets filled with people and police officers, from all walks of life, who are united in finding a solution to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again. I see people, joining together on one side, fighting the same fight.
Let’s not forget that America is largely made up of these people, and not those faceless and unidentifiable creatures that lurk in the darkness.
