COVID-Diary, Week Twelve

And now, this! We, who have all been discussing how our nation can come back from the one-two punch of a horrific pandemic that has already taken more lives than the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined (and which is quickly approaching the number of American deaths in the First World War) and a level of unemployment and economic upheaval unlike anything we have had to deal with since the Great Depression—now we are also obliged to deal with unrest in our nation’s streets that threatens to overwhelm not only our best efforts to respond thoughtfully and efficiently to the COVID-crisis through social distancing and the various other methods we have adopted to cope with the spread of the virus, but even the basic level of security we have come to expect in the nation’s streets and public gathering spots. And there is no particular reason to expect things to calm down any time soon. Nonetheless, to focus solely on the unrest and to ignore the underlying reasons that have brought so many protesters into the street would be a serious error of judgment. Nor am I being especially innovative here: any doctor will tell you that the only real way to cure a patient is to eradicate the disease, not merely to palliate its symptoms!

Even so, the urge to focus on the symptoms rather than on the disease is strong in many Americans. And, admittedly, it would be easy to wave away the nation-wide reaction to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis as an exaggerated response to a problem already solved by framing it as a story about four citizens deemed responsible for the death of a fifth who were then summarily fired from their jobs, arrested, and indicted. Indeed, when framed as a story about some bad men who collectively did a bad thing and got caught on camera doing it, it does sound like an almost ordinary event in the life of the nation. After all, aren’t people arrested daily and charged with various sorts of crimes? But a different picture entirely emerges if we shade in some relevant details and then retell the tale so that it becomes the story, not of some random criminal who got caught doing a bad thing, but of a fully-armed white police officer who, acting in the presence of—and apparently with tacit consent of—three fellow officers, exerted so much force subduing a black man that the man actually died as a result even despite the latter’s unambiguous and repeated statements that he was in serious physical distress. Telling the story that way reframes it as part of a larger pattern of police behavior towards members of the black community and makes it as much about the administration of justice itself as about racism or prejudice. And that is why it would be such a huge error of judgment just to wave the incident away as a bad thing that happened to some poor guy and for which four bad apples in a bag of otherwise good apples will surely pay the big price. It certainly doesn’t appear to seem that way to black people! Nor should it to anyone.

Sometimes you really do have to step back to see the big picture. And, indeed, by rejecting the “narrow prism” approach, the nation has made the incident’s aftermath into as much a part of the story as the incident itself. Derek Chauvin, the police officer now indicted of second-degree murder in the death of George Floyd, has been fired. The three other officers present when George Floyd died have also been fired and charged with abetting his murder. Like all arrested individuals, they have the right to be defended ably in court. And they have the right to be presumed innocent until found guilty. All that is as it should be. But to feel the matter behind us because of those four arrests is to miss the point almost entirely because the unrest that has now spread to more than 140 American cities is not really—or at least not solely—about George Floyd, who more the match in this story than the fuse: the explosive materials already existed and the fuse was in place. But someone had to ignite that fuse…and that is the role that George Floyd posthumously played.

As I write this, there has been more than a week of unrest. There have been wholly peaceful protests. But there has also been violence, and not only in Minneapolis but also in almost every major American city including Washington and New York. There has been looting as well. But denouncing looters as thugs and thieves is one thing and using our natural inclination to condemn that kind of criminal behavior as an excuse not to ask why the incident triggered such a dramatic outpouring of passion on the part of so many Americans, black and white, in the first place would be a grave error of judgment.

For most white Americans, racism feels like a thing of the past, a feature of the Reconstruction era in the 19^th century that lingered on in American life until the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s—and particularly the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968—finally solved the problem permanently. I doubt many black Americans would find that sentence even remotely cogent. And it is that sense that racism remains a guiding force in American life—and, at that, a pernicious influence that consistently subjects black citizens to a level of demeaning, degrading treatment at the hands of the authorities that white citizens mostly prefer to know nothing of—that sense that racism is anything but  a thing of the past is the fuel that has fed the fires that have raged across the land since the Floyd murder just a week ago.

There is no excuse for looting or putting people’s lives at risk by fomenting riotous behavior, nor should or could there be. But white Americans would do better to ask themselves where this rage born of a sense of powerlessness in the face of prejudice is coming from. To justify looking away from the problem that is motivating so many thousands of people to take to the streets and demand justice by choosing instead to focus on the criminal behavior that has led to the destruction of property is seriously to miss the point. Yet that has been the approach of the current administration—to focus solely on the excesses, to threaten to unleash the full force of American military might to restore order, and to attempt to bully demonstrators into staying home lest they find themselves in harm’s way when the shooting begins—and it is not a productive one by any means. Nor is it morally justifiable.

Looking at all this through my own personal eyeglasses, it’s impossible for me not to imagine what the fate of millions upon millions could have been in Europe had the citizenry taken to the streets when the Nazis first made it clear that they intended to deny Jewish citizens any possibility of being treated fairly or justly by the police or the justice system. In the German federal election of 1932, the Nazis won a little over 37% of the popular vote. That means that a little under 63% of voters voted against them, representing tens of millions of citizens. All were opposed to Nazism! And all of them, at least at first, had the capacity to speak out loudly and forcefully. What would have happened if millions had taken to the streets in 1933 to protest and to insist that justice prevail, that prejudice directed against innocents be eradicated, that the government behave responsibly and fairly towards all of the nation’s citizens? Could they have altered the course of history by demanding justice for all?

Like all “what-if” questions, this one too has no answer. But one plausible scenario features the Nazi leadership, including the Führer himself, responding to endless, massive unrest in the streets by accepting that they were weakening, not strengthening, the ties that bound the nation together by behaving disgracefully towards innocents based on their faith, their race, or their ethnicity. Hitler was a viscious racist and anti-Semite. So were his henchmen in the Nazi leadership. But they all obviously felt that by promulgating anti-Jewish laws they would increase, not decrease, the level of support they were going to need to accomplish their other goals. But what if millions in the streets told them otherwise? We’ll never know, of course, how they might have responded because those theoretical millions did not take to the streets to protest injustice, to insist on equity and fairness for all, or to repudiate racism and anti-Semitism as cancerous growths that had the power eventually to destroy the host body, in this case the German nation itself. Whether average German citizen of those years is or isn’t fairly described as a willing partner in genocide is a matter for historians to debate. But that the Nazis’ first efforts to deny justice to all were not met with the kind of opposition that even they could not have ignored—that too is part of the story of Germany’s descent into a hell of their own making.

Could that descent have been averted by people in the streets demanding a different course forward? None can say. But that is the specific question that the events of the last week across our nation prompted me to ask myself as I watched the nation’s streets becoming filled to overflowing with people insisting that all citizens get a fair shake, that the police relate to citizens of all races precisely in the same way and with neither prejudice nor racist preconceptions guiding them, and that the legacy of the Reconstruction era—still very much alive and with us more than a century and a half after Appomattox—be finally laid to rest as a pernicious part of our history that deserves to be studied carefully even as it is forcefully and formally repudiated at every level of civil life.