13. Change Is Everywhere, or So It Seems
WHEN THE NFL PLAYERS RELEASED THEIR AD, I was surprised to see the New York Giants’ Saquon Barkley as part of the lineup. I am a New York Giants fan, and I can attest, sadly, that this is a staid and conservative franchise. “Buttoned-up,” “straitlaced,” “by the book,” as aesthetically exciting as a Brooks Brothers suit, that is how I understand the Giants. Proudly blue collar is how less jaundiced fans see “Big Blue.” However, even my sclerotic (hardened by tradition gone stale) Giants have found themselves unable to resist the winds of change. Amidst the broader socioeconomic concerns, a pandemic that threatens the health and safety of the players and their families (to say nothing of the broader community), and the prospect of playing before empty stands, with players almost certain to take a knee during the playing of the national anthem to protest police brutality, Barkley, the Giants’ star running back, expressly raised the possibility of the team sitting out a game in protest. In the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, Barkley was the Giants player featured in an ad that spoke out against racism and in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement. As a black Giants fan, it is beginning to feel a little like “Big Blue” has caught up, finally, to the 1960s.
It proved to be a tense summer, Ezra. Michelle Obama reminded us of it when she named our condition “systemic racism.”1 We are living in a country that feels as though it is on the precipice of some great disaster. Foreboding is everywhere. Despite this, a significant swathe of white America remains, at best, indifferent to black death, at worst, willing to stand by, tacitly supporting this violence. A tacit support that calls, from Trump in his time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on down, loudly, for “law and order.” No doubt, my son, you’re savvy enough to know that such rhetoric amounts to the countenancing of more black death. By local police officers or the federal reinforcements called in to restore “law and order.”
Sometimes, as in Minneapolis, Portland, and Kenosha, things take an even more ominous turn. White vigilantes, both local and from out of state, either instigate or heed, sometimes it’s the same thing, the call to protect “property.”
In the name of “property” all kinds of violence against bodies—black, white, Asian, indigenous, Latina/o—protesting police brutality can be called into being. We saw this in Minneapolis, where a fascist white actor instigated violence, only to have the legitimately peaceful protesters impugned. Even when the truth was made public, very little changed in the narrative.
The truth of our moment is that the truth—veracity, facts, science—is no match for white ressentiment. Peaceful protesters remain, for that constituency of white America, subject to criminalization, which means, inevitably, that they remain subject to state—in its full, ideological sense—retribution. This aggrieved white constituency, angered as they are by any form of minority advancement (blacks, immigrants, Muslims, and others are all targets of their wrath, the objects of their vitriol), this constituency was empowered by the Trump White House, even in the wake of Trump’s electoral defeat and the right-wing media’s call to take action. So that they might “save their country,” one presumes. To save this country from us, people like you and me, black people, just for starters. It is, however, surprising how often that is their point of departure, though, isn’t it?
This white constituency, whom Trump did not create but certainly emboldened (as the events of January 6, 2021, clearly showed), is by no means a new political phenomenon. What distinguishes them is that they had a bullhorn in the White House and a concerted right-wing news outlet, Fox, in its many iterations (I include right-wing AM radio in this designation), which allows for greater reverberation across the airwaves and in social media. They also have a deep demographic fear, one they can barely pronounce. They fear what is imminent—and immanent. The United States is in the process of becoming a white majority minority state, sometimes referred to as the “browning of America.” Whites are about to become a minority in a country that they have always considered, with no good historical reason, “theirs.” In a world where rapid change is the order of the day and the American empire is in visible decline, the truth of living in a waning hegemon is proving too powerful a reality for even the most hardnosed nationalists. Why else would they cling so desperately to the fiction that is “Make America Great Again”?
It is this entangled morass of fear, xenophobia, nostalgia for empire, and nativism that is ballasted by centuries of white supremacy. It is this existential fear, “existential” in their minds, at least, that spurs the right wing to unleash their virulence—physical as well as rhetorical—on those protesters they consider, in their terms, “looters,” “rioters,” all of whom are urged on by “socialists”—or, without distinction, “communists.” At best, or worst, these “socialists” are members of the Democratic Party. If only we lived in a world of Democratic socialists. If only.
The white right pronounces the protesters “impatient” because they will not wait for the legal system to do its work. Except, of course, no one deemed Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, or George Floyd worthy of the right to due process.
Justice is reserved for cops, preferably white cops. Under the guise of a police Bill of Rights. “Blue Lives Matter.”
The “due process brigade” are old hat to the protesters. The protesters, in their many and varied formations, are well versed in that old Led Zeppelin refrain. They already know the outcome. Best to just hum along with Robert Plant: “The song remains the same.”
The protesters know, and they will be especially familiar with this if they are fans of the NBA’s Kawhi Leonard and his mute New Balance advertisement, how things end. The police officer, or officers, as is often the case, is acquitted. Law, as it contorts itself to serve the ends most advantageous to white police officers, and order, as in retaining the status quo, can be relied upon to carry the day. The American justice system works, its advocates, who come in many stripes, insist. Indeed, it works, except for those who are not white. Everyone gets their day in court, free to make their case before a jury of their peers. Everyone is guaranteed a fair trial. Everyone, that is, except the dead or paralyzed or brutalized black body.
Emmett Till. Black America remembers, to this day.
At the end of Derrick Chauvin’s trial, Emmett Till’s family joined in sympathy with George Floyd’s.
The Mississippi River divides the Twin Cities. St. Paul on the river’s east bank, Minneapolis on its west. With George Floyd’s murder, twenty-first-century Minneapolis finds itself yoked by shared black death to the Civil Rights struggle of the mid-1950s.
John Lewis. Civil Rights activist, congressman, Lewis paid the price, with a cracked skull, for daring to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge.
Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Carol Denise McNair (11), killed in September 1963 at the 16th Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama.
Black America remembers not because things have changed, but because they have remained so unutterably the same—at least as it pertains to the vulnerability of black bodies to white law enforcement.
The “indefatigability” of black memory. The burden of “indefatigability.”
Muhammad Ali bore that burden with bravado, insouciance, and no small amount of anticolonial defiance. In 1967 Ali refused the draft, his logic unimpeachable, never to be forgotten: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong, they never called me nigger. They never lynched me.”
Tommie Smith (gold) and John Carlos (bronze) made their opposition visible, inscribing their militancy in silence. They let their gloved hands do the antiracist talking.2 Together, that is, with the white Australian Peter Norman (silver), who stood in solidarity with them. Norman displayed his Olympic Project for Human Rights badge prominently (as did Smith and Carlos), as though he was as proud to oppose U.S. racism as he was to have clinched his silver medal in the 1968 200m dash. When Norman died in 2006 in Melbourne, Australia, Smith and Carlos served as pall bearers. This is how athletes who long ago stood together on a podium in Mexico City, who stood for justice and against state violence, honor each other in death. They walk in silent solidarity, as they once stood back-to-back all those years ago, silent, face turned against the world.