Isn't It About Time For Some Racial Justice Reform In Our Country?

Later-- after the CNN appearance above-- on Fox News Sunday, Cornel West said "What we’re seeing here is the ways in which the vicious legacy of white supremacy manifests in organized hatred, greed and corruption. We’re witnessing the collapse of the legitimacy of leadership, the political class, the economic class, the professional class, that’s the deeper crisis... The beautiful thing is we’re seeing citizens who are caring and concerned hitting the streets. The problem is we have a system that’s not responding and seems to be unable to respond." And Trump does nothing but make everything worse-- in this case much worse.

Roxane Gay isn't as well known but her NY Times OpEd yesterday was just as salient and just as important. "Eventually," she wrote, "doctors will find a coronavirus vaccine, but black people will continue to wait for a cure for racism... The economy is shattered. Unemployment continues to climb, steeply. There is no coherent federal leadership. The president mocks any attempts at modeling precautionary behaviors that might save American lives. More than 100,000 Americans have died from Covid-19." Actually, that 106,128 deaths in the U.S.

Many of us have been in some form of self-isolation for more than two months. The less fortunate continue to risk their lives because they cannot afford to shelter from the virus. People who were already living on the margins are dealing with financial stresses that the government’s $1,200 “stimulus” payment cannot begin to relieve. A housing crisis is imminent. Many parts of the country are reopening prematurely. Protesters have stormed state capitals, demanding that businesses reopen. The country is starkly dividing between those who believe in science and those who don’t.

...The disparities that normally fracture our culture are becoming even more pronounced as we decide, collectively, what we choose to save-- what deserves to be saved.

And even during a pandemic, racism is as pernicious as ever. Covid-19 is disproportionately affecting the black community, but we can hardly take the time to sit with that horror as we are reminded, every single day, that there is no context in which black lives matter.

Breonna Taylor was killed in her Louisville, Ky., home by police officers looking for a man who did not even live in her building. She was 26 years old. When demonstrations erupted, seven people were shot.

Ahmaud Arbery was jogging in South Georgia when he was chased down by two armed white men who suspected him of robbery and claimed they were trying perform a citizen’s arrest. One shot and killed Mr. Arbery while a third person videotaped the encounter. No charges were filed until the video was leaked and public outrage demanded action. Mr. Arbery was 25 years old.

In Minneapolis, George Floyd was held to the ground by a police officer kneeling on his neck during an arrest. He begged for the officer to stop torturing him. Like Eric Garner, he said he couldn’t breathe. Three other police officers watched and did not intervene. Mr. Floyd was 46 years old.

These black lives mattered. These black people were loved. Their losses to their friends, family, and communities, are incalculable.

Demonstrators in Minneapolis took to the street for several days, to protest the killing of Mr. Floyd. Mr. Trump-- who in 2017 told police officers to be rough on people during arrests, imploring them to “please, don’t be too nice”-- wrote in a tweet, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The official White House Twitter feed reposted the president’s comments. There is no rock bottom.

Christian Cooper, an avid birder, was in Central Park’s Ramble when he asked a white woman, Amy Cooper, to comply with the law and leash her dog. He began filming, which only enraged Ms. Cooper further. She pulled out her phone and said she was going to call the police to tell them an African-American man was threatening her.

She called the police. She knew what she was doing. She weaponized her whiteness and fragility like so many white women before her. She began to sound more and more hysterical, even though she had to have known she was potentially sentencing a black man to death for expecting her to follow rules she did not think applied to her. It is a stroke of luck that Mr. Cooper did not become another unbearable statistic.

An unfortunate percentage of my cultural criticism over the past 11 or 12 years has focused on the senseless loss of black life. Mike Brown. Trayvon Martin. Sandra Bland. Philando Castile. Tamir Rice. Jordan Davis. Atatiana Jefferson. The Charleston Nine.

These names are the worst kind of refrain, an inescapable burden. These names are hashtags, elegies, battle cries. Still nothing changes. Racism is litigated over and over again when another video depicting another atrocity comes to light. Black people share the truth of their lives, and white people treat those truths as intellectual exercises.

They put energy into being outraged about the name “Karen,” as shorthand for entitled white women rather than doing the difficult, self-reflective work of examining their own prejudices. They speculate about what murdered black people might have done that we don’t know about to beget their fates, as if alleged crimes are punishable by death without a trial by jury. They demand perfection as the price for black existence while harboring no such standards for anyone else.

Some white people act as if there are two sides to racism, as if racists are people we need to reason with. They fret over the destruction of property and want everyone to just get along. They struggle to understand why black people are rioting but offer no alternatives about what a people should do about a lifetime of rage, disempowerment and injustice.

When I warned in 2018 that no one was coming to save us, I wrote that I was tired of comfortable lies. I’m even more exhausted now. Like many black people, I am furious and fed up, but that doesn’t matter at all.

I write similar things about different black lives lost over and over and over. I tell myself I am done with this subject. Then something so horrific happens that I know I must say something, even though I know that the people who truly need to be moved are immovable. They don’t care about black lives. They don’t care about anyone’s lives. They won’t even wear masks to mitigate a virus for which there is no cure.

Eventually, doctors will find a coronavirus vaccine, but black people will continue to wait, despite the futility of hope, for a cure for racism. We will live with the knowledge that a hashtag is not a vaccine for white supremacy. We live with the knowledge that, still, no one is coming to save us. The rest of the world yearns to get back to normal. For black people, normal is the very thing from which we yearn to be free.

I asked some of the top congressional candidates from around the country how they are thinking about the weekend's protests and if they're at odds with their opponents about the racial justice issues.

Lisa Ring is running in the coastal Georgia district and her opponent is a Trumpist Republican, Buddy Carter. Lisa told us that on Sunday she "attended a peaceful protest in Savannah along with hundreds of protesters in my district. Sadly, protesting against racial hatred, brutality and murder has become all too familiar on the coast of Georgia. Just a few weeks ago I was in Brunswick (also in my district) protesting the murder of Ahmad Arbery and the corruption of the Glynn County D.A.s office to arrest the perpetrators who hunted down and killed Ahmad. Rep. Buddy Carter offers the usual platitudes. Yet, he would never join us at a protest or propose any significant change involving racial justice or law enforcement accountability. To do so would anger his support base which remains at the heart of a systemically racist system that refuses to die. We marched this same route in 2016 shouting 'black lives matter' after the deaths of Philando Castile and Eric Garner. We heard the same canned responses from our leaders. If we expect change, we must do more than march, we must take power away from the ineffectual leaders in our country who lack true compassion and provide no solutions to injustice.

The Democratic candidate in Riverside County's 42nd district is progressive Liam O'Mara and he's taking on serial Trump enabler Ken Calvert. "Year after year,"he told us this afternoon, "we see the same stories, about young men and women of color savagely beaten or killed for non-violent crimes. At some point you would think the country might listen to the many sociologists and historians who have been describing the causes for decades. But no, every time it seems to follow a predictable pattern of short-term outrage, then a return to business as usual, with public figures seldom asking the hard questions or proposing viable solutions. And solutions do exist! Instead of terrorizing poor communities with heavily-armed enforcers, we should invest in businesses and civic renewal projects. We need fully to break the school-to-prison pipeline, and that means taking the emphasis off of law enforcement and placing it on things like counselling and adequate resources for success. In addition, we need to create a stronger culture of individual accountability among the police, and get back to the spirit of community policing to restore trust in law enforcement. Our congressmember, Ken Calvert, has made an appeal to God and called for us to move forward in peace. This is a polite way of saying nothing should change, the protesters should go home, and life for middle class white America can return to blissful ignorance of the daily challenges faced by people of colour. We don't need a 28-year incumbent with a history of race-baiting-- we need a new voice to tackle the challenges of our times.

Cathy Kunkel is running in the central district of West Virginia, also against a Trump Republican, Alex Moonie. "In the WV Can't Wait movement," she told us today, "we are fighting for a government for works for all of us. Not just the 97% white population of West Virginia, but all of us. That means taking on a broken criminal justice system where 12% of our prison population is black, an education system that disproportionately funnels black students into a school-to-prison pipeline, and an economic system where the racial wealth gap is growing even wider. These are problems that must be tackled at the federal, state and local level, and we must do so by listening to and lifting up the voices of black leadership - leaders who have been speaking up for decades about the pain and fear in their communities. As Martin Luther King, Jr said, 'a riot is the language of the unheard.'"

Texas progressive Mike Siegel is taking on GOP incumbent Michael McCaul in a gerrymandered Texas district that was created to prevent Travis County (Austin) from being fully represented. Siegel told us that "We are looking at a 400-year history of slavery, Jim Crow and institutional racism, compounded by a national health pandemic, compounded by an economic crisis, compounded by a hateful and divisive presidency. There will be no easy fixes or 'going back to normal.' What is needed is massive, structural change to how we approach public safety, policing, and criminal justice. The Texas 10th has long been a center of struggle for racial justice. This is the home of Prairie View A&M, a leading historically-- black college located on a former slave plantation. This is where Sandra Bland died in police custody after an unconstitutional arrest. This is where Rodney Reed has been on Texas Death Row for decades for a crime that was committed by a white former police officer who was protected by his friends in law enforcement. And this is where Michael McCaul has been a 'representative' for sixteen years in name, never lifting a finger to fight for Black lives in any of you nine TX-10 counties. This week I am joining Ayanna Presley’s call for passage of

The People’s Justice Guarantee, a comprehensive demand for criminal justice reform. We have much to do to create an equitable and just society, and eradicating racism in criminal justice is an essential part of this work."

There's just one progressive challenger in Arizona who has a chance to replace a conservative, Eva Putzova. She told us that her "ex"-Republican Blue Dog opponent is mouthing the same tired platitudes that all conservatives save for a weekend like this. "Tom O'Halleran's response to the latest brutal murder of a black man at the hands of a white police officer was 'we need to improve our understanding of racism.' These are empty words from another politician who has no plan or intention of providing real solutions to systemic racism in our country. A bill to just study the idea of reparations for African-Americans has been in Congress for 5 months and he hasn't co-sponsored it. To save lives, we need bold reform that flips the system on its head. That's why I proudly signed current and former congressional candidates Cori Bush (MO-01) and Anthony Clark’s (IL-07) Pledge to End Police Violence, which includes comprehensive reform to tackle police violence head on. To address the systemic racism embedded in our country, we also need deep criminal justice reform, including the federal legalization of marijuana, and ending cash bail and for-profit prisons. And that's just to start. We can't solve systemic racism in a few bills, but it's the duty of our Congressmembers to move us closer towards justice. Right now, Tom O'Halleran is sitting still."

Monroe County, NY progressive Robin Wilt is taking on a do-nothing career politician of her own party. Racial justice is an important issue for her; though not for him. "According to 24/7 Wall Street, my Congressional District is ranked second-worst in the nation in terms of outcomes for Black Americans," she told me. The only one that ranks worst is the Minneapolis Congressional District in which George Floyd was murdered. What that means in terms of health care, educational, and wealth and income disparities, is that Black Americans in my district are three times as likely to be impoverished, three times as likely to be unemployed, and have a homeownership rate of less than half that of their white counterparts. These disparities are borne of the structural racism and unjust policies of which my opponent, as a three-decades-long state Assemblyman in the region, is one of the architects. As one of my supporters so eloquently said, 'You cannot expect the people who made the system, who have spent their lifetime benefitting from the system, to change it.'

Rochester has also had its own issues with police brutality and lack of accountability. Recently, the electorate overwhelmingly passed a referendum establishing a civilian review board that has subpoena power in matters of police discipline. In an ongoing lawsuit, the Police Union has attacked the Police Accountability Board civilian oversight provision on constitutional grounds. My opponent has remained silent on the matter.

The Rochester City School District, which according to the same 24/7 Wall Street article, is comprised of approximately 90% students of color, recently faced a $30-million dollar budgetary shortfall. My opponent, instead of calling for New York to live up to its obligation to fully-fund the district’s foundation aid that is its due, callously called for Donald Trump’s Justice Department to investigate the Rochester City School District’s finances. This is the self-same segregated school system that LA School Report identified as having the most economically segregating school district border in the country.

As I listened to the impassioned testimonials at the Rochester Black Lives Matter protest this past Saturday, out of the corner of my eye, I witnessed my opponent ducking out. I was surprised that he had deigned at all to make an appearance, so when he exited prematurely, in the middle of one Black and Brown person after another expressing the pain and anguish of the inequities that our communities of color endure, I couldn’t help but think that his act of turning his back and ducking out on the speakers, after taking his photo opportunity, was the perfect analogy for how he has treated our communities of color during his tenure as an elected official.

It is time that we had a representative in the 25th Congressional District who not only understands that it’s not okay to turn one’s back on our most vulnerable and disaffected communities, but also that in order for us to make progress as a district, we must do so together; it cannot be achieved at the expense of our most marginalized.

Tom Guild is also taking on a pathetic excuse for a Democrat, but in Oklahoma City. His opponent is Blue Dog Kendra Horn, one of the most anti-progressive members of the House Democratic caucus. "There are so many pernicious and vexing problems begging for systemic change in America," Tom tildes today. "The ruling political class plays games with people’s lives in order to stay in the saddle and continue to not only not solve existing problems but to add new quagmires to the top of the heap. Black and Brown people in our country start their struggle to survive more often than not dealing with the heavy weight of poverty on their backs. We desperately need systemic change. For instance, most people of color in America have either no health care available or woefully inadequate options. We could make systemic change to help nearly everyone by moving to a single payer health care system. It would take the profit incentive out of the equation and greatly diminish the grating weight on the backs of Americans. It would also help Black and Brown Americans the most, because they are the ones suffering the most under the current for profit system.

"Even the Pelosi-led Democrats in the U.S. House are simply kicking the lead weight down the road by propping up the private health care system and maximizing profits for Big Insurance and Big Pharma, and calling that reform. The Senate Republicans are even worse. Black and Brown neighborhoods tend to have poor educational opportunities, which exacerbates the problems faced by our Brothers and Sisters of Color. At the state legislative level, most legislatures have Democrats 'fighting' to provide too little funding for minority schools, while many Republicans want to defund public schools altogether and plow what little public money there is available into 'charter' and private schools, either directly or indirectly.

"So our Black and Brown Brothers and Sisters are stifled by poverty and lack of quality educational opportunities. As they grow up, many minority children learn to fear law enforcement officials and are often treated with disrespect, threats to their lives, and too often actually lose their lives at the hands of police officers who are charged with protecting them. The recent list of Black Men and Women unarmed and submissive to police, who nonetheless end up losing their lives grows like topsy. Not only is the George Floyd case very recent, it is also particularly heinous and egregious. White officers had him subdued and completely under their control, while one of the white officers put his knee and the weight of his body on the neck of Mr. Floyd for nearly nine minutes and for three+ minutes after George Floyd begged for his life by painfully communicating that he could not breathe. Mr. Floyd’s alleged crime was trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. There are so many words or phrases to describe Mr. Floyd’s horrific experience. Heinous. Brutal. Despicable. Unforgivable. Racist. Inhumane. Heartbreaking. Senseless. The list goes on and on.

"We desperately need systemic change in the criminal justice system. It way too often treats people of color as the dreaded-- other. First, police forces should closely mirror the demographics of the areas they serve. E.g. If 30% of a city’s population is black, 30% of the police department should be black. We need to solve the cruel problem of poverty. We need to provide all of our brothers and sisters with a quality education. We need to treat everyone with respect. We need to prosecute errant law enforcement officials, so that justice is truly blind. We need to love one another. We need to follow the Golden Rule. We need to elect people to represent us who want to make systemic changes and solve intractable problems. We need to defeat or not elect candidates who are on the make and are political social climbers and don’t care about the people they represent. God knows we have a lot to do, a lot of systemic changes to make, and a whole lotta love to dole out by the truckload. He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother or sister or neighbor or co-worker or fellow American or human being. It seems a daunting challenge, but as the old saying goes-- a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Do Black Lives Matter? Hell. YES! Once we wrap our minds, hearts, and souls around that one, we begin the process of systemic and healing change and the opportunity to solve difficult and vexing problems, instead of adding to the list horribles! We should adopt Jackie DeShannon’s Put a Little Love in Your Heart as our second national anthem!"