IS A NOUN, JUSTICE IS A VERB, AND NOUNS ARE NOT ENOUGH
PREFACE
RACISM AND INEQUALITY IN A TIME OF ILLNESS AND UPRISING
BY THE TIME you read these words, we will know the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. We will know whether American voters—or at least 75,000 people or so in a handful of key states—have re-elected Donald Trump for four more years or decided to end his time in office and return him to reality television. No matter the answer, this book will remain relevant, because the issues about which it is concerned pre-date his presidency and, if history is any guide, will continue to plague us long after he is gone.
That said, this has been a strange time to compile a collection of essays on race and racism. With a man such as Trump in the White House, I knew as I began work on this volume how quickly events could change and how often race-related stories could emerge from an administration that, from the beginning, sought to divide the nation along lines of race, ethnicity, and religion, for political gain. Keeping up could prove hard, and I always suspected we could get near publication time only to have to insert something at the last minute to reflect the latest outrage. Little did I suspect, however, what 2020 would ultimately have in store for the nation.
As I write these words, it is autumn, and the coronavirus pandemic is still ravaging the planet. More than 200,000 people have died in the United States alone, and estimates as to what may lie ahead are unsettling. Experts say that at least 60 percent of the earliest deaths in the United States—and most of those that occurred later—could have been avoided had President Trump taken the threat seriously from the beginning. Had he even listened to members of his own administration and the intelligence community that serves him—voices that were trying to tell him in early January of the dangers ahead—tens of thousands of Americans who have died might still be alive today. Likewise, had he been as concerned with public health as with his own private gain, he might have resisted calling for a quick re-opening of shuttered businesses in the hopes of an economic rebound. But with millions thrown out of work and the economy contracting by one-third in mid-summer—the largest single economic collapse in contemporary national history—Trump’s concerns were with spurring commerce and evincing optimism that the virus would magically disappear: anything to bolster his sinking poll numbers and his re-election chances. The results, of course, were predictable and have proved tragic. Sending children back to school, encouraging people to gather in restaurants, bars, churches, crowded downtown streets and beaches—lobbying tirelessly for a return to “normal”—the president and his enablers have endangered the lives of millions. This they have done for the sake of political marketing, hoping that even if hundreds of thousands more die, his attempts to blame the virus on China (where it originated, although the most virulent strain to hit the U.S. came from Italy) will convince enough voters that none of the suffering was his fault.
According to the data, around half of all fatalities have been persons of color, and the mortality rate for black, Latinx and indigenous folks has been about 2.5 times higher than for whites. It is not likely a coincidence that the Trump administration met the present challenge—one in which people of color have done a disproportionate share of the dying—with such nonchalance. Indifference to black and brown suffering, if not outright hostility to black and brown peoples, has been a hallmark of Trump’s presidency and most of his life. And if this had not been clear enough from the administration’s response to COVID, it would be made glaringly obvious from its reaction to the other major event of this year: the uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police.
Once video footage of Floyd’s murder went viral, showing officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, while continually sporting a disinterested smirk, it was only a matter of time before the nation exploded. Although we had witnessed this scene before, seeing on film the killings of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, and John Crawford III, among others, this time was different. Perhaps it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, or perhaps it was the relative quiet and isolation of the COVID lockdown providing people the space to truly see and feel in ways that would have been more difficult had they been going about the normal hustle and bustle of their lives. But whatever it was, within weeks millions of people in the United States, including large numbers of whites, had poured into the streets in the largest mass uprising for racial justice in the history of this country.
In the face of more than 11,000 overwhelmingly peaceful protests, the administration and local authorities have met demonstrators with tear gas, clubs, and rubber bullets. On multiple occasions, the president has threatened to call in the military to suppress lawful assembly and protest, and actually did so in response to demonstrators in the District of Columbia. Hundreds of videos available online show law enforcement attacking nonviolent protesters without provocation. Dozens of people, including police officers, have attempted to run over demonstrators with their vehicles. The hostility of the “law and order” brigades, from the president on down, is apparent, and their embrace of authoritarianism has been laid bare for all to witness. Since June 2020, we have been in the midst of a full-scale rebellion, or what some have called a soft civil war. Not between North and South, or even black and white, but between those who believe in racial equity and pluralism and those who do not.
And into that breach, in late August, yet another black man, Jacob Blake, was shot in the back and killed on camera by an officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The rebellion that followed involved widespread property destruction by those frustrated with the lack of charges brought against the officer. This uprising was then countered by white vigilante violence, including the murder of two white antiracism activists by 17-year-old Trump supporter and police super-fan, Kyle Rittenhouse. The president, in keeping with his soft-pedaling of right-wing violence, not only refused to condemn Rittenhouse, but has justified his actions as self-defense, and continued to blame the black community and its supporters for the chaos.
This volume is divided into seven sections containing essays written from 2008 to the present. The first two chapters track, in chronological order, the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. They seek to show both the continuity of race as the background noise of everything that happens in America, as well as the way that the nation can quickly careen from hope and optimism around race to the depths of cynicism. The third section looks specifically at this unique moment in our history, and the way in which both COVID and the current uprising for black lives have rendered 2020 a year that few others can match for historical significance. Sections four through six contain essays that speak to three broad themes: white denial about the reality of racism in the United States, historical memory and the way our tendency to misremember our past contributes to racial strife, and the propensity of the nation’s right wing to rely on faulty data to craft their narratives in opposition to racial justice efforts. The final section seeks to provide some direction for antiracism work, activism, and advocacy, both for individuals and for institutions, moving forward.
There is one thing, however, that binds these chapters together: They all speak to the core crisis at the heart of this nation. Because however unprecedented this moment may be in our lives, in some ways what it reveals is as old as the country itself. Some lives matter more than others in America. It was true at the founding. It remains true today. It will remain true forever, unless and until we decide we have had enough.
A few words about citations and sourcing of fact claims in this volume: Because this is an essay collection, I have opted to forego formal footnotes, endnotes, or parenthetical citations within the body of the work itself. To insert such notes would have proved visually distracting in short pieces, and would have increased the size of the book to an unwieldy length. However, because it is important to make citations available, especially for references, data, or historical materials that are not widely known or understood, City Lights and I will be posting references on their website, www.citylights.com. These notes will be textual, meaning they will be broken down by chapter, and then reference particular page numbers, with a few words