Where Do We Go From Here?

Near the end of Spike Lee’s classic (and sadly current) 1989 film, Do the Right Thing, an ongoing conflict between the community and Sal’s Pizzeria leads to a deadly confrontation with the police wherein a young black man is killed by a chokehold. The thought of this happening in 1989 was hard for some to accept in 1989, the reality of it happening in 2020, nearly 31 years later, is terrifying. Art, in its many forms is at its best when it reflects or brings focus on real life. The United States of America has had a problem with racial injustice and institutional racism from before its inception. The slave trade, which officially began with the arrival of Africans via a Dutch ship in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, was still going strong when the 13 colonies declared their independence from England. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” is how the famous document begins. One wonders how the Founding Fathers could stomach such obvious hypocrisy with a straight face as the plantations wore worked by slave labor. How much equality can exist when you have a society that permits you to own another human being as property? The easiest way to ease a guilty conscious is to first strip a person of their humanity. If they are not human, then you don’t have to treat them as equal.

Fast forward 400 years and it is not surprising that you have elements of our society that do not see certain groups as human or equal. This makes it easy kneel on someone’s neck without empathy until such time as they are dead. The brutalization of black and brown bodies by overseers on plantations, posses chasing down runaway slaves, and later by lynch mobs after the Emancipation Proclamation and through the Jim Crow era has continued through the early part of the 21st century. Cell phone technology and highspeed data networks have allowed something that has always happened to now be documented in real time. Now that the images are everywhere, people can no longer pretend to not see. Symbols of hate are being pulled down and removed throughout the nation, while at the same time, people are digging in their heels to protect their heritage. Municipalities are taking a hard look at what a modern police force should look like and how it fits in the communities it should serve and protect. Now that the nation is “awake”, where do we go from here?