To the Editor:
As we round the corner into Black History Month, nearly three years after the murder of George Floyd, we find ourselves yet again facing unspeakable violence against a Black person, Tyre Nichols — say his name. Those of us in the movement for change have noticed a lag in the energies catalyzed by the atrocity of George Floyd’s murder.
Statements made by organizations, governments, and communities at the time seem to have lost steam for actually making good on changes promised … have you felt it? And of course, we face the dead-serious resistance of elected officials such as Gov. Ron DeSantis, with his wrongheaded ban on AP African American Studies in Florida, and his overall desire to erase Black history and experience, not to mention the backlash of recent writings on the “ineffectiveness” of D&I work.
We are reminded of the 1980s campaign SILENCE = DEATH, made by LGBT activists to draw attention to the lack of government discourse and action around HIV/AIDS when it was dismissed as the “gay disease,” and people were dying horrible deaths unrelieved by government intervention, research, or clinical trials.
We advocate for a molecular commitment to historical literacy necessary to build the shared understanding we need as a people — as We the People — to stop this traumatic habit of disregarding the value of Black human life. This time is no different, for the events of Jan. 10 raise a more complex question: What if the officers are Black?
Our answer to what feels like an impossible conundrum is to return our focus again and again to the “system” in systemic racism, a system that transcends identity in its distribution of safety and harm. We are reminded of an anecdote shared by Archbishop Desmond Tutu about the racism he internalized as he absorbed the world of apartheid-era South Africa (in other words, his unconscious bias — as a Black man — about Black people). In his book “No Future Without Forgiveness,” about moving past the devastating rifts created by institutionalized racism, he describes entering an airplane, glancing into the cockpit, and arriving at his seat in “a panic,” fighting a visceral urge to get off that plane. Analyzing the source of his perception, he understood that he wanted to get off that airplane because he had seen a Black pilot in the cockpit, and his deep, unconscious perception was that a Black man could not fly that plane. As Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter insists, racism is in the air we breathe. With great humility, Archbishop Tutu illuminates in that story how we all are subject to the perceptions we absorb from living in a society with a long history of formal, institutionalized, legalized racism, bolstered by centuries of degrading representations and criminalization, to cement what we call “bias.” Bias lives in the hearts and minds of white, Black, Brown, and all people.
Our call to action: bracing conversations about the role of systemic racism in Tyre Nichols’s death; about the origins of “the police” in slave patrols; and about how we keep our collective feet on the gas of the movement to end violence against Black citizens, riding the winds that started swirling when George Floyd suffered that knee on his neck, refusing to let up, pushing our communities, governments, and organizations from awareness to accountability and action for change. The very “AP African American Studies” conversation that some folks prefer we not have.
Jane Edmonds
Oak Bluffs