Thread by @MaryLTrump

I was out all day last Friday and was spared the media’s decision to turn the brutal beating of an innocent young man into some kind of dystopian game show. Charles Blow referred to the countdown clock as, “a damning indictment of American perversion.” Yes.

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Police brutality against Black Americans occurs with such frequency that there is a recognizable pattern of responses that politicians and pundits use to deflect blame from the officers, to shift it onto the victim, or to change the subject entirely.

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We don’t yet know why Mr. Nichols was pulled over but—unless you can tell me there’s a traffic crime an unarmed man can commit while alone in his car that deserves the punishment of death without the benefit of indictment and trial—it doesn’t matter.

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Nichols tried to do as he was told and then, terrified, blinded by pepper spray, and realizing the futility of it, he ran. When the officers caught up with him, there was literally nothing he could have done to stop the vicious beating that would eventually end his life.

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Surely the murder of Tyre Nichols will be enough to force the issue of reform? Well, we thought the same thing after the video, the first of its kind, of the horrific 1991 beating of Rodney King was made public. Apparently, we were wrong.

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Apparently, we needed more proof that the problem isn’t a few bad guys but a deeply corrupt institution rooted in white supremacy; more proof that white privilege poisons everything and makes it possible for even the best-intentioned white person to hide behind ignorance.

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The eight-minute-and-forty-five-second-long video of the murder of George Floyd should have moved the needle. But no. Instead, we marvel at the similarities across atrocities and go on to have the same conversation.

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In the wake of even the most basic, incremental reforms failing to be enacted—things like ending qualified immunity and disbanding local units like SCORPION—calls to defund the police made perfect sense.

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Instead of doing the hard work, though, politicians decried the slogan without giving any meaningful thought to why some Americans had come to the conclusion that defunding the police was the only solution to an entrenched problem.

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Cowardly Democrats ran away from the conversation, worried more that the slogan was going to have a negative electoral impact than the fact that Black Americans keep getting murdered by police officers.

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Blacks have been brutalized by whites since the first ship made the journey through the Middle Passage. Even so, after the tragically short post-Civil War period of Reconstruction, America made a choice to turn its back on the cause for which the war had been fought.

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While Northern Republicans deferred to the prerogative of white men, even Southern traitors, newly-freed Blacks were blamed for their poverty, illiteracy, and political power even as whites withheld the means by which they could procure wealth, education, and power.

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The line from slavery through Jim Crow to mass incarcerations of Black men and the epidemic of police murders of innocent Black Americans remains unbroken—and unacknowledged by those who have the luxury of pretending that such injustices don’t have any impact on their lives.

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The narrative promoted about the civil rights movement stands in stark contrast to the almost nonexistent narrative about the white men and women, private citizens, law enforcement, and legislators, who violently impeded the fight for civil rights.

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This narrative avoids telling the often-brutal history of civil rights by ignoring the complicity of law enforcement, downplaying the racist tactics and the dirty politics, and eliding the role many white citizens played during Jim Crow.

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The more whites exercise their privilege, the easier it gets to cross that line between doing so unconsciously and doing so because they feel entitled to it. It is so easy to get used to the luxury of forgetting and the luxury of never having to know.

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As a result, white Americans live in a fearful, controlling, and often violent society of our own making, and unless we take the necessary steps, we’ll remain trapped by it.

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We worry that by acknowledging the atrocities of the past, the guilt of the actual perpetrators will somehow attach to us. Meanwhile, it is the failure to acknowledge those atrocities that makes us complicit.

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We can’t keep moving on without first digging in our heels and demanding what’s right, even if it hurts. Nothing will change in an America that values whiteness above everything else if we, those of us who can, refuse to make a different choice.

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