By Marjorie Cohn / Jurist / June 19, 2020
That’s not a chip on my shoulder.
That’s your foot on my neck.
– Malcolm X
On May 25, a Minneapolis police officer tortured George Floyd to death in what his brother, Philonise Floyd, called “a modern-day lynching in broad daylight.” Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in all 50 states and Washington D.C.; the anti-racist uprisings continue.
Why do a majority of people in this country now support the Movement for Black Lives? Why have calls to defund and abolish the police entered the mainstream discourse? Why are people risking the deadly coronavirus to join the protests? And why are we seeing what may be the broadest popular movement in the history of the United States?
More than 400 years after the first Africans were kidnapped, forcibly brought to this country and enslaved, White supremacy continues to infect our society. Police murder Black people with impunity. Black people are incarcerated at an unprecedented rate. And White fragility keeps us in denial about our White skin privilege.
In his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that racism must be exposed. He wrote, “Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”
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This was and is a fantastic movement that is long overdue. Worldwide involvement is historic! But knowing the history and making a fundamental change is a different thing. My fear is that once the high volume media coverage jumps to the next story, Americans will lose interest quickly. Except for a few small revisions to local PD’s things will revert very quickly to “business as usual”. Police have already backed off needing to change, and the disinformation from the right is spreading quickly. Lets see how much real change happens in the next few years before we celebrate the effectiveness of our movement. In solidarity.
Compliments to KABC for this . . . it made me smile.
“A group of Democratic activists and organizations have partnered to launch a super PAC called Defeat by Tweet, which aims to use President Donald Trump’s Twitter habit against him.”
“Powered by Momentum, an app that allows automatic donations to vetted nonprofits, Defeat by Tweet lets users pledge a donation between 1 cent and 10 cents for every time Trump tweets to his 82 million followers.”
“Each contribution will be made in the president’s name and go directly to the Justice Fund, a group of 15 Black-led political organizations with the intention of thwarting Trump’s reelection chances. Organizations like Color of Change PAC, The Collective, Black Voters Matter Fund and other similar political and social justice reform groups, especially those focused in swing states such as Michigan and Arizona, will be included in the campaign.”