Getty Images/iStockphoto
Sad to say, many Americans are old enough to remember 1967, the last time brutal treatment of African Americans at the hands of white police erupted into destructive violence in cities across country including Milwaukee that including smashing windows, looting and burning down family-owned businesses in black neighborhoods.
But here’s something we don’t remember from the 1960s. We don’t remember the president of the United States threatening deadly violence from National Guard troops against those he called “THUGS” protesting treatment by police: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
That’s the difference between President Lyndon Johnson, who passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Donald Trump elected as an openly racist Republican backlash candidate to succeed America’s first African American president.
We thought the combined public health and national economic crises created by Trump’s incompetence couldn’t get any worse, but no one can be surprised Trump is eagerly seizing an election year opportunity to inflame America’s ugly racial divisions and stoke urban violence.
Threatening Civil Rights
Trump revels in threatening violent attacks on civil rights demonstrators reminiscent of racist Southern sheriffs in the 1960s. He boasted if protesters had breached the White House, they “would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen. That’s when people would have been really badly hurt, at least.”
Playing a victim under siege from anarchists Sunday night in an underground White House bunker, Trump spewed attacks on Democratic politicians and imaginary bogeymen he portrays as the evil masterminds behind racial protests. “Get tough Democrat Mayors and Governors,” Trump tweeted. “These people are ANARCHISTS. Call in our National Guard NOW. (Many already had.) The World is watching and laughing at you and Sleepy Joe. Is this what America wants? NO!!”
|
|
Trump accused Democratic D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser of failing to provide adequate police support to protect the White House, the most massively protected building on the planet. Bowser responded with a perfect description of the presidential leadership America desperately needs right now that Trump is totally incapable of providing.
We Need Leaders
“We need leaders,” Bowser said, “who . . . in times of great turmoil and despair can provide us a sense of calm and a sense of hope. Instead, what we’ve got in the last two days from the White House is the glorification of violence against American citizens.”
Comparing the current protests to those that spiraled out of control half a century ago, the greatest tragedy is so little has changed about the brutal and often life-ending tactics police use to detain black suspects for minor, non-violent crimes they may or may not have committed. There was a brief flicker of hope in the widespread, interracial revulsion of Americans everywhere seeing the horrific death of George Floyd that sparked the nationwide protests.
Millions were appalled watching portions of a nearly nine-minute bystander video of a white Minneapolis police officer pressing his knee on the neck of a hand-cuffed black man with his face crushed into the pavement with the victim protesting he couldn’t breathe until he lost consciousness. The officer charged with murder kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than two minutes after another officer found no pulse.
The officer who ended Floyd’s life committed the act calmly with one hand in his pocket as three other officers watched quietly as if it were all in a day’s work. It’s just what happens to black men in America.
Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said Trump welcomed the urban anger over police tactics as a chance to become the law-and-order candidate to distract from his own election-year failures to protect public health and the economy. “Is this going to be the summer of COVID-19 or is this going to be the summer of urban unrest?” Brinkley asked. “And Trump does not want it to be the summer of COVID-19.”
Destructive Excesses
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the basketball great who began his professional career winning the 1971 NBA championship for the Milwaukee Bucks, wrote eloquently for The Los Angeles Times about the destructive excesses rising out of mob protests by desperate people pushed to the edge.
Abdul-Jabbar wrote he doesn’t want to see stores looted or buildings burning. “But African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere.”
African Americans have always known that. White folks including myself thought we’d made much more racial progress until the 2016 election of an openly racist president slammed us back to reality. The thing is, most Americans still want to believe we’re better than that. We’re just going to have to work a lot harder to prove it.
