This article first appeared in New English Review.
As our election draws near, race relations are going to be an issue, largely due to the George Floyd death in Minneapolis and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which along with Antifa, is increasingly resorting to violence and hate. Here are some of the more recent developments:
George Floyd's
autopsy had reported shortly after his death that the cause of his death was not asphyxiation, rather cardiac-pulmonary arrest brought on in conjunction with the arrest struggle. We subsequently viewed additional videotape of the incident which indicated that officers acted properly at least until the point that officer Derek Chauvin placed his knee on Floyd's neck for several minutes. Floyd, indeed, was resisting arrest and officers were trying to get him into the patrol car. That was the point that he stated he had claustrophobia and that he "couldn't breathe".
Now
toxicology reports have come back that indicate that Floyd died of a cardiac-pulmonary arrest likely due to the large amounts of drugs in his system including the deadly Fentanyl. He already was suffering from severe heart disease and was using multiple drugs. What that does is put the impending trial (s) of the four indicted officers in question. I, along with millions of others, was deeply troubled by the tactic which we believed had caused his death. The neck is a sensitive part of the body, where injuries can lead to death, and choking type methods should be reserved for situations where the officers is fighting for his life. Yet, the toxicology report states that Floyd died of cardiac-pulmonary arrest brought on by the amount of drugs in his system and his prior heart condition-both of which were exacerbated by the struggle with police, which he necessitated by his resistance, but that there were no physical injuries suffered which would have caused death.
Now it appears that Chauvin will maintain that he wasn't exerting much pressure with his knee-just enough to keep him in place, and the scientific reports will apparently back him up. Brace yourselves for excitement. However this trial ends up, there will be a lot of people who will feel that justice was not served.
That leads us to Black Lives Matter (and Antifa, who should never be left out of the conversation.). BLM is responsible for some, if not most of the violence we saw erupting in the initial demonstrations.Yes, there were peaceful demonstrators protesting the shocking video and the death of Floyd. It was people like BLM and Antifa who took advantage of the protests to wreak havoc behind the peaceful protesters.
Now the violence has simmered down somewhat, but we are still seeing images of on-going violence in Portland as well as a few other cities. Our biased news media can refer to Portland as "mostly peaceful protesters" all they want, but that is now a distortion of fact. Portland is now anarchists attacking the federal building in Portland. The face of Portland is now some character named
Marquise Love charged with the horrifying attack against a defenseless white man, kicking him in the head and knocking him unconscious.
This has nothing to do with George Floyd.
Similarly, when BLM protesters in St Louis break through a gate into a gated community and threaten residents, we have seen a white couple chase them off with weapons-only to be indicted by the local DA. (The charges were dismissed by the Missouri AG.)
Similarly, we have seen BLM demonstrators march to a largely white neighborhood in Seattle and demand that the white residents surrender their homes to blacks.
This is no longer about George Floyd; this is about anarchy, insurrection, and trying to inflame racial tensions. And they are being inflamed. The web is full of reports of the execution-style
slaying of a 5-year-old white boy in North Carolina, shot in the head on his bike by a black man. Why? Because the boy was sitting on his bike on the man's lawn. People across the web are asking why this incident is not getting wider coverage in the media. Of course, we know the answer.
And herein lies another danger, which I sense is already happening. A lot of people are starting to develop more negative attitudes about black people as they discuss these issues. But that would be just as big a mistake as BLM activists and their white leftist supporters in academia claiming that all white people are inherently racist and privileged. That is no more true than the idea that all black people are shooting 5-year-old white kids to death. We have to resist the temptation to believe the worst in other people. Unfortunately, we are headed in that direction.
I still maintain that while America was certainly racist when I was a boy, it is not racist today. We have racial problems and there are many people in the inner cities who, for whatever reason, got left behind in the Civil Rights era.
I don't have the answers to these problems, but I still feel, perhaps, naively, that all we can do as ordinary people is simply to treat each other with friendliness and respect. The government is not going to fix the problem. Reparations will not fix the problem. Washing the feet of black people will not fix the problem. I am not willing to do that, but I am willing to treat everybody with equal respect. That is all the ordinary citizen can do.
But first, we have an order of business, and for that, we have to look to the government. We need these anarchists of whatever color to be arrested and prosecuted. Then we can get back to the business of improving our society.
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