As I was saying...
Hopefully, none of you have noticed I took a break from posting on social media the past week or so aside from shamelessly promoting my two podcasts. (available on Apple Podcasts and many other major podcasting platforms, just go on ahead and smash that subscribe button)
I emphasize that my break was from posting. I’ve been lurking. Creepin’. Watchin’. Readin’. Thinkin’. There’s been so much happening worldwide that I thought stepping back would help me process things. It wasn’t an attempt to escape the conversation. It was an effort to think about what I had to add to it. (Yes, I am aware of the irony of that sentence given I did two podcasts talking about George Floyd. No, I will not address that irony. It’s my blog and not yours)
It feels strange to talk about how sad the George Floyd story made me as a white person. While I feel pain and sorrow and anger a human being – a human being in the United States of America – was killed by a police officer again in a country whose white population is still coming to grips with how shamefully common this type of story has been in our history, there are added layers of hurt and rage and fear that simply aren’t mine to carry. I’ve had several interactions with police officers in my life – some innocuous, some more serious – but never did I fear for my life. There have been multiple occasions where I’ve been pulled over late at night with friends, or my wife, or alone, without incident. I can imagine how some of those instances would have gone differently had I been born with different-colored skin.
I’m at a loss on how to solve
racism at a macro level. Clearly, I’m not alone, or we’d be living in a much
different world right now. It’s an insidious beast, adapting to society’s
changing tolerance for hurtful language and ideas with more “tasteful” words
and guerilla mindsets. When a congressman (!) says things like “White nationalist, white supremacist…how did that language become offensive?”, it
moves the Overton window
back in such a way that calling a black person a “thug” or being surprised at
how “articulate” they are isn’t so bad because hey, at least you’re not using
the N-word like a racist would.
The same way the phrase “Black
Lives Matter” isn’t the whole platform but the slogan representing a more
complex set of ideas, the phrase “All Lives Matter” isn’t an actual policy idea.
(that’d be like naming an activist group “Breathe Oxygen”) But in this case,
it’s an axiom one uses to notify those around them about what sort of ideas are
safe in your space. Call it virtue-signaling for those who either genuinely dislike
the idea of ethnic minorities being treated the same as whites, or find the prospect
of consequential change so challenging and thorny that they’d rather hand-wave
it away.
To these issues, I don’t have an
answer beyond asking people who look like me to be willing to expand your
bubble. Engage with people around you who you might not frequently talk with. Learn from people who are way smarter than you or I. Call out racism when you
are able.
And be aware of your privilege.
That doesn’t mean that you, as a white person, are condemned to a life of self-flagellation over the advantages your race buys you. Just allow it
into your consciousness as a piece of information that – like every other piece
of information you’ve learned – informs your decisions in some way.
There are many ways we can reform
the system, though. We can chip away at or eliminate qualified immunity, holding cops accountable for their
actions and implementing an insurance system akin to malpractice. We can reduce funding for police departments so they no longer have free reign to
purchase military-grade armor and weapons. We can give cops more training. We can further diversify the police force.
The Martin Luther King Jr. quote “I think that we've got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard” has
made the rounds in recent weeks, and with good reason. When people feel they
have been shut out of the voting system and the public discourse with no respite,
there are only a few options left to make their voices heard. But we can make voter registration easier and more transparent. We can make Election Day a
national holiday. We can make wholesale changes to our voting system to make it easier for candidates
without an (R) or (D) next to their name to reach office.
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My biggest struggle has been attempting to balance the two catastrophic events occurring simultaneously: police brutality and the centuries-long plight of racism inherent in institutions of America, and…you know…the pandemic. COVID cases are going to spike. They already are in some places around the country. There is a confluence of factors that will cause this spike: economies re-opening before it’s appropriate, people gathering in protest of stay-at-home orders because they want to reopen their businesses (or, like, get a haircut), general quarantine fatigue, etc.
But there’s no getting around the fact that, no matter how justified the cause, having thousands of people gather in the
areas of the country where infection rates are highest to chant and shout and
open their mouths – some wearing masks and keeping their distance, some not – is less than ideal in
the midst of the worst pandemic since the Spanish Flu. And the protestors
aren’t the only ones at risk; the WHO, CDC, and every other public health
alphabet agency has warned us for months about the risk of transmission by asymptomatic
carriers. There will likely be thousands of people who didn’t attend the
protests – including the elderly and immunocompromised – who will get sick from
someone who did.
That a group of infectious disease
experts signed a letter supporting the demonstrations – while validly pointing out that
systemic racism also leads to systemic healthcare issues for the oppressed,
hence the higher COVID infection rates among blacks and Latinos – is still baffling to me
after the directives we’ve been given for months. (The “make sure you’re all
wearing masks and keeping your social distance during those mass protests” guidance
felt tacked-on, like a parent telling their kids “don’t get in too much trouble
now, ya hear?” as they headed out for a night of definitely not drinking)
Though I would have felt this way
regardless, I will admit to some bias here: my wife is a clinical pharmacist at
a hospital in Philadelphia. She’s had four days off since the quarantine began
in mid-March, and she’s still fielding work calls on those days at home. She’s
exhausted. Her peers are exhausted. We have several blessings: we both still
have our jobs and our health, and our friends and family have been supportive,
caring, and understanding. But an increase in COVID cases means more work, more
late nights and weekends, more time spent in a hospital full of COVID patients,
more time driving in and out of a city that’s been in a state of unrest for much
of the past 2-3 weeks, more time apart, and more chances to get infected.
I’ll stan
for anyone’s right to protest and speak one’s piece under the First Amendment
until the cows come home. But admittedly, I grew irritated with people who spent
months showering praise upon healthcare workers and other essential personnel, imploring
their friends and family to help them out in any way they could, only to then say
that it’s OK to go protest because this – systemic racism, police brutality – took
precedence. “Stay inside, don’t overtax the healthcare system, don’t put
Grandma and Grandpa at risk…except for now, because this is more important!” That’s
what I was hearing, anyway.
Of course, sometimes the subtext of a message is in the eyes and ears of the audience. Where one person might see a pro-protest message and read “we don’t care about the pandemic anymore,” the messenger may have crafted said message and only meant “you know, maybe cops should stop killing unarmed black people, just an idea guys, open to suggestions.” That’s what my more rational side has allowed to wash over me the past few weeks. It’s easy for one’s first reaction to a major event to be “how does this affect me? How does this affect my family and my friends?” It’s less justifiable to never move beyond that initial viewpoint. If this seems like a realization I should’ve come to earlier, my response to that is: Probably! But I’m trying, man.
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It took me a while to get my eye
back on the ball the last few weeks, though. I thought I was doing so by
looking at the images of Minneapolis and Philadelphia and Washington D.C. and
seeing COVID where others saw centuries of anger and injustice bubbling over. Instead,
I was internally engaging in something that frustrates me to no end in regular
debate: whataboutism.
I hate whataboutism for several
reasons, namely because it assumes humans don’t have the bandwidth to be concerned
about more than one thing. You think people shouldn’t complain about Trump’s
immigration policies when Obama deported more illegal immigrants than any prior
president? What if I told you *extremely Morpheus voice* that both are bad?
I am eminently capable of being upset
about COVID-19 and systemic racism, about how terrible our current
President is and the lack of appealing options presented by the primary
opposition party, about the Eagles’ porous secondary and their failure
to acquire a reliable left tackle to protect Carson Wentz’s blindside. (I’m a
Philly sports fan. Being dismayed over several things at once was one of the first
things I learned to do)
Whataboutism also tends to shift blame from our social and political institutions (for the sake of getting all Zach De La Rocha up in here, we’ll just call them “The System”) to citizens, when The System is often at fault. Take voting as an example. The same System that props up the Giant Douche vs. Turd Sandwich debate every four years (two if you’re doing it right!) also makes it nigh impossible to elect anyone outside of the two major parties. Yet instead of cursing The System and demanding voting reforms, we typically scold people for who they vote for, excoriating them for making the best of a bad situation in their minds.
Look, there’s only so much that
could have been done about COVID-19, but if those in power had taken greater
precautions and warned the public about its severity instead of sweeping it under the rug (and profiting off of it), maybe it wouldn’t be quite as calamitous to have thousands of
disillusioned Americans take to the streets to protest law enforcement’s
treatment of minorities – which, of course, The System also has a hand in.
Obviously,
it’s not the fault of the protestors that there’s a pandemic. It’s immensely
unfair to force someone to make a value judgment between “protest for your
right to be treated as a human being in the eyes of the law, putting your life
and the lives of your loved ones at risk of respiratory infection” and “stay at
home to avoid the pandemic, putting your life and the lives of your loved ones
at risk of being killed consequence-free by the cops.” No person should have to
make that decision, and yet, here we are in the darkest timeline. So the question we have as a society is who to hold to
account: the individuals compelled to make choices under circumstances that
seem straight out of a dystopian novel, or The System that imposed those
choices upon them?
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David Foster Wallace once wrote of
“a real American type of sadness,” an emptiness in one’s soul that they could
not fill no matter how much they tried. Those inflicted instead numb themselves
through consumption, drugs and alcohol. (I did not originally learn this from “Infinite Jest.”
I learned it from a Hold Steady song.
My brand is strong)
It isn’t a perfect parallel, but
“American sadness” feels like the most appropriate phrase for what I’m feeling
now. For all its defects and
the black marks it has collected over its 232-year history, the idea of America still
felt unassailable to me. Call it ethnocentric, call it naïve, but I still felt
pride in my country. When stories about Eric Garner or Michael Brown broke, or when our nation’s chief executive condemned a fantastic
“American carnage” in his inaugural address, or when images of immigrant children kept in holding pens separate from their parents appeared, I pitted
them against my idealized version of the nation. “I can’t believe this is
happening in America, in my country. This stuff happens in other
countries. Not here.”
The past few years have truly
tested that pride, but especially the last few months. I know I’m not alone in
that because of how many folks yearn to go “back to normal.” Whether to escape
the quarantine, the news, or the gloom in general, people want some degree of
“normalcy.” (Presumably, “normal” is limited to whatever American life was like
before, say, the stock market collapsed three months ago)
People want to go back to work and
see loved ones, sure, but they also want to go back to going places, to buying
stuff, to having awareness of the news and the world around them but generally
being able to escape. The “American sadness” is still present, if in another
form, but our avenues for ignoring it are limited when it’s at our doorstep
every damn day.
The desire for normalcy is, well,
normal. And assuaging your mental anguish with doses of normality in a very
abnormal time is healthy, to a degree. But the truth is, whenever all this
*gestures broadly at the world* is over, “normal” as you and I might know it
isn’t waiting right around the corner. “Normal” as of February 2020 probably
isn’t coming back.
Commerce, the healthcare system,
and everyday interactions are set to consequentially change due to the
pandemic. Law enforcement and police oversight is set to consequentially change
due not just to the recent demonstrations, but the relentless activism of
groups like Black Lives Matter over the past seven years.
The question of whether the new
normal will be better or worse largely hinges on Big Scary Things that aren’t
within our individual control. But there are lots of smaller actions we can all
take to make things better, usually in the form of giving money (to charity
or medical research, to public officials who are worth your dime) or giving time (to local causes, to writing your elected
officials, to learning about issues).
This
isn’t the first time we’ve been presented the opportunity to fundamentally
change society for the better, though. People have protested police brutality
against persons of color many times before. But it’s hard for the average person to keep up with
those issues, to keep giving time and money to addressing problems that don’t
always immediately impact them. It’s not hard because it’s too daunting a task
to handle; it’s hard because it involves ongoing sacrifice that continues long
after the news first breaks, long after the protests end, long after it’s the
top story. Often, we note how terrible it is when it happens, shake our heads,
pay lip service to the cause, and move on to something else within the span of
a few weeks, while the folks who have a vested interest in keeping things the
same (or making them worse) continue unabated. If the “new normal” is to be a
better normal, it won’t happen without an ongoing effort from each one of us.
America’s in rough shape right now. If we don’t ignore the underlying reasons why, it won’t be that way forever.
Thanks to my wife, my brother, and my friend/podcast co-host Sean for giving this bad boy a once-over
