Lately, the news has got so depressing that sometimes I wished I could escape from it.
That is the way I have been feeling since the coronavirus pandemic changed the rhythm of life, upending our assumptions, habits, verities, beliefs, plans, and the entire spectrum of human relationships.
The feeling becomes almost overpowering as each news cycle brings with it the latest bulletin on the ravages of the disease – fresh outbreaks, a grim tally of deaths, with those that have occurred since the last bulletin in parentheses; the desperate battles to save stricken patients amidst crippling shortages of equipment and supplies, relieved mercifully by occasional tales of heroism and generosity and sacrifice.
You felt helpless as death, violent, agonizing death, stalked the street and the neighbourhood, places near and far, familiar places around which your life has oscillated.
Who would have thought that, in response to the pandemic, America the Beautiful would be reduced on the world stage to America the Pitiful, its repellent president pouting petulantly, enacting sophomoric stunts and engaging in bilious rants at a time that calls for leadership of the highest order?
That feeling was especially strong as the world approached a macabre milestone: 100, 000 deaths, on American soil, resulting directly from coronavirus disease that Trump had dismissed casually as just another “Democrat hoax,” a bogus manifestation that would vanish just as suddenly and as it had appeared. Just give it a week or two, he had said.
Those who thought that Trump could still be saved from his hubris and narcissism and that that the milestone would concentrate his mind and make him sober for once were cruelly disappointed. The milestone went unremarked in the White House until the following day, and then only desultorily.
Trump had much more important things to do: He launched a renewed attack on the World Health Organisation and it leadership for allegedly colluding with China to conceal vital information about the origins of the coronavirus and cut off funding in a bid to emasculate the world body. It did not matter that he had, at the onset of the pandemic, praised the WHO and China for their transparency.
Then, news broke on Memorial Day, May 25, of the death of yet another black man, George Floyd, 46, at the hands of white police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Such killings are almost routine in America, often at the slightest provocation and sometimes with no provocation whatsoever.
The initial police report followed a familiar pattern: Floyd had resisted arrest, showed signs of medical distress, was taken to a hospital with signs of trauma to the mouth, and he died.
A perfunctory investigation would have followed; the officers would have been cleared and would have returned to work after routine suspension with full pay or redeployed to desk duties. There would have been scattered protests and demonstrations, and defiant expressions of outrage. And matters would have ended here.
But what the video evidence revealed were the chilling details of a heinous murder.
George Floyd, suspected of purchasing a pack of cigarettes with a fake $20 bill, is lying on the paved road, held down by two police officers, his face turned to the side, his head wedged by the rear wheel of a police cruiser, the knee of a third officer jackknifed into his neck while a fourth officer engages horrified bystanders in banter
Floyd is whimpering and writhing, saying over and over again that he cannot breathe. In his disorientated state, he even calls for his mother who had died several years earlier. Bystanders scream from sheer horror at the murder in progress, but the officers are unmoved.
Instead, one officer is heard taunting Floyd, “Get up, rogue, and get into the car,” even as a fellow officer’s knee and full weight rested on his neck and remained there for three full minutes after Floyd lost consciousness. The strangulation lasts more than nine minutes. By the time a police ambulance arrives, Floyd is dead.
Throughout this macabre spectacle, the officer resting his knee and weight on Floyd’s neck is a picture of calm, self-possession. It is as if he is doing the most natural thing in the world. Left hand tucked in the pocket of his trousers, he reminds you of a game hunter posing with the lifeless trophy of his safari. Invoking Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, said that it represented the “banality of evil.” I call it the “I dey kampe” pose.
Three days passed and protesters took over the streets before that officer was arrested.
This was one murder that was going to change the conversation all right and take the spotlight away from the coronavirus, but not in the way I was expecting. For the next six days, anger and fury flowing a vast accretion of wanton police killings of unarmed blacks exploded from coast to coast into violent protest and pitched battles with the police. Their service vehicles and offices went up in flames, setting the night sky aglow in city after city.
Even the White House felt the heat and turned off the lights last night.
Americans who still believe in human solidarity were in one collective resolve saying: Enough is already too much. No more. They had witnessed over the decades and in city after city, a police force enjoined to serve and protect the public, serve and only their own kind and inflict grievous harm on others; they had lived with a system that has turned justice into a game, guaranteed to be won by those who can buy the best lawyers and expert witnesses, a system rigged, from arrest to sentencing, against defendants of color.
Blacks had already taken a hammering from the coronavirus epidemic. In city after city, they suffered the most deaths even though constitute only a fraction of the population, not particularly because of any inherent pathology but because American society is structured in such a way that each vulnerability begets another one, until life itself is little than a formidable calendar of vulnerabilities.
Being black or a person of color in America is the fundamental pre-existing condition from which all other vulnerabilities derive.
In its 1967 Report commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson following the disturbances and civil disorders rooted in racial discrimination that pervaded the United States in the 1960s noted as follows
“Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans.
“What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.
“It is time now to turn with all the purpose at our command to the major unfinished business of this nation. It is time to adopt strategies for action that will produce quick and visible progress. It is time to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens-urban and rural, white and black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group.”
Submitting that violence and destruction must be ended—in the streets of the ghetto and in the lives of people it called for programmes to be launched on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems and aimed for high impact in the immediate future in order to close the gap between promise and performance. It also called for new initiatives and experiments that can change the system of failure and frustration dominating the ghetto and weakening society.
That was a different America; gravely flawed, but owning up to those flaws and seeking ways to live and be governed by the noble precepts of its Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths . . .”
The modest changes that followed have since been disavowed, discredited, or abandoned. The voting rights for which black people fought and died are being eviscerated by the courts though all manner of subterfuge. Access to the ballot box where black people can exercise the same voting rights for which they were recruited to fight and die in Iraq and Afghanistan, and before that in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, is daily being blockaded.
Fifty-three years after the Kerner Report, racial tensions are as fraught as ever in America. The American Dream remains just that for the many, sustained by the illusion of access to easy consumer credit. The world’s wealthiest country is also the only industrialised nation that regards health as a commodity, not a human right.
The courts and the police and the political process have been weaponised to maintain the status quo. A mean spirit is abroad.
All this conflated to light the fuse in Minnesota, culminating in the deadly and destructive conflagration that swept the United States this past week.
The United States will have to work hard to assert a claim to the trust of its wronged citizens and regain its place in the world.
Credit: Olatunji Dare