Chances are you’ve seen excerpts from the Rev. Al Sharpton’s eulogy for George Floyd on Thursday. It was a tough and compelling exhortation to white America to “get your knee off our necks.” But it was also singularly optimistic. Sharpton repeatedly invoked Ecclesiastes 3:1, which says “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven,” and suggested that this may finally be the time when it’s possible to put an end to racial injustice at the hands of police officers.
I’ve been thinking a lot about whether that may be true. “This time is different” is a sentiment that’s been expressed so many times, and more often than not it turns out not to be the case. But there does seem to be something different about the present moment. Not least that’s because the video of Floyd’s killing was so horrifying, but also because it followed so many other killings of unarmed black people at the hands of police officers or white vigilantes in the very recent past. Of course those killings are just the tip of a veritable iceberg of racial injustice in the United States going back 400 years, so it’s fair to ask why we might expect anything to change now.
I don’t know that it will, but it’s notable that we’ve had protests in all 50 states for almost two weeks now. I don’t remember that ever happening before. (Jimmy Kimmel notes that we can’t even get all 50 states to agree on daylight savings time.) There have also been demonstrations in other countries calling for racial justice in the United States.
The New York Times reports that a Monmouth University poll released this week showed that 76 percent of Americans — including 71 percent of white people — called racism and discrimination “a big problem” in the United States. That’s a remarkable consensus, and it’s 26 percentage points higher than it was just five years ago. In the poll, 57 percent of Americans said demonstrators’ anger was fully justified, and another 21 percent called it somewhat justified.
I heard a black mother on TV talking about the danger that her sons live with every day. She said that being black is as threatening to other people as being armed. It made me imagine how people would react to me if I went through my entire life carrying a gun, a gun I could never put down. I imagine that provides a hint of what it’s like being a black man in America.
It will be a very long time, if ever, before racial bias is eliminated in this country. But in the meantime, what we should be able to accomplish is an end to state-sanctioned discrimination. There may always be bigotry, but we need to ensure that acting on that bigotry, or even standing by and allowing others to act on their bigotry, results in consequences commensurate with the damage done.
There was a season for ending slavery. There was a season for eliminating state-sanctioned racial segregation. There was a season for ensuring black people the right to vote. Perhaps this is the season for ending racial discrimination in policing.