Day 79
When you’re under quarantine and also curfew, which one wins? Mathematically, I have to think they cancel out. Am I wrong?
I don’t watch the news, since talking heads are known superspreaders, so it could be I have this wrong, but my impression is that a section of the populace feels that amongst the people allowed to kneel on a man’s neck until he dies, for no demonstrable reason, we should not count those who have sworn oaths to uphold the law.
Some holders of that opinion have been expressing it emphatically the last two nights, and now my city is making a friendly request that no one come out and watch the police while they finish sorting the whole thing out.
I suppose it’s easy to point fingers at the police (Quite easy. Take the recent study that showed a black man’s dramatically higher likelihood of being pulled over, compared to the general population, becomes much less pronounced a night, when it’s harder to see in the windows, and officers have to fall back on the quality of one’s driving in making their automotive assessments), but such finger pointing would neither protect nor serve.
There are racists in the world. There are those who have the word “Racist” actually tattooed on their knuckles. When we find such people in positions of power we ought to remove them from those positions quickly and completely. In that sense, there is a fight at hand against racists. Yet I suspect the next advance in defeating racism will not be the building of a better machine for ferreting out racists. The machine we need is the one that ferrets out racism in people like me.
Though I make efforts not to be racist in my thoughts or my actions, it’s nonetheless true that I grew up in America. Not just America—one of the whitest towns in one of the whitest states in America. I’ve been breathing the pollution of systemic racism all my life. Though I didn’t invent it nor invite it, that racism has seeped into my cells and become part of me. If racism is to be defeated, it will be less in the finding and labeling of racist men, it will be in the drawing out of poison from my own body, the labeling of my own thoughts, the recognition of double standards I help uphold, the assumptions I make in absence of evidence.
If I wait until windows are being smashed before I contemplate such things, I think I know where the blame for those broken windows ought to be placed.
