Fola Ojo
Monday, May 25, 2020. He walked into a Minneapolis grocery store to purchase a pack of cigarette. He brought out a $20 bill. The store attendant adjudged the legal tender a counterfeit and called the police. Within minutes, Tou Thao, Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Keung, all white and Asian Minneapolis police officers, surrounded 46-year-old black man, George Floyd. They shoved him out of his van and bundled him into back of the police vehicle. A struggle ensued. Another white cop, Derek Chauvin, joined the band of brutes-in-blue.
With the help of his colleagues, Chauvin dragged claustrophobic and an already-handcuffed Floyd from inside the police vehicle onto the ground. He deployed his knee to the arrested man’s neck in a hold. Blood supply and oxygen to Floyd’s brain were severed. Floyd cried: “I can’t breathe…I’m going to die”. Chauvin did not budge. He must have been enjoying the groaning of a black man crying for help as other raging cops watched on. Eyewitness bystanders screamed at the cops that the man in their custody was dying. Chauvin didn’t care. He continued to barrel his knee down on the neck of an overpowered black man. Floyd foamed in the mouth. Floyd died! It took the Minneapolis police eight minutes to kill an unarmed black man. In America, there are still men-in-blue who do not see black people as human beings deserving to live.
Police brutality against Black Americans is a reality. Activist preachers have preached about it for eons. Singers have sung it in songs. Civil rights groups have picketed about it. Laws have been mended and amended regarding it. Racial dissonance and discordance in the United States of America are as old as the nation itself. It is the racial disharmony and inequity millions of Americans have been protesting all across the land in the last 10 days. Protesters are white and Black; young and old; able and disabled. They are relentless and tireless. Americans are hungry for a change in a system that’s not treating black people fairly. Black people, my friends, are endangered species in their own country.
Although the protests have been largely peaceful, thugs infiltrated the protest fuelling more mayhem. The Department of Homeland Security reported that some White supremacist groups may be using fake social media handles to incite violence using amorphous names pretending to be other groups. It is unfortunate that some miscreants have taken advantage of a righteous fight and just struggle to perpetrate looting sprees. Buildings are torched and cars set on bonfire. People have been injured and some have lost their lives. Churches have not been spared in the outbursts of rage over Floyd’s murder.
As I write, American cities are inundated with protests because of racial injustice and inequity.
January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Hopes radiated in the faces of many black people who believed that an end had come to their sufferings. The proclamation became an ebullient daybreak to end the long night of mental and physical captivity. But, over 150 years after, the black man is still in chains. Manacles of discrimination and shackles of oppression are still hanging around his ankles. In the land of flowing with milk-and- honey, the black man is mourning and continues to wallow in abject poverty. Racism persists in American schools. The coloured student receives a harsh punishment for the same offence that a white student gets a slap on the wrist. It is still on our jobs where the qualified, educated black man is denied employment while the white candidate is ushered in to a position because of the colour of his skin. It is still in our politics where code words are subtly thrown around to demean a candidate of colour. Despite some progress made over the years, racism is alive in the United States; and black people remain endangered species.
My wife is an officer in America’s correctional system. The story she has told me about young black men in jail daily troubles my spirit. She weeps in her heart for mothers whose kids are in the slammer and many for very nauseatingly frivolous offences. Reports show that age cohort 16 to 25 is what the police daily target for humiliation and incarceration by a crippled and unfair justice system. Blacks are 51% more likely to be arrested, 92% more likely to be convicted of a felony, and 19% more likely to be convicted of any crime. While blacks comprise approximately 14.6% of the US population, they represent 40% of those incarcerated.
Between 1995 and 2005, blacks constituted 13 per cent of drug users but accounted for 46 per cent of drug convictions. More than 80% of those sentenced for crack cocaine offences were black, despite the fact that the majority of users of the drug is white. Nearly one-in-three black men in their 20s is in jail, prison, on probation or parole. African-Americans and Latinos were found to constitute nearly 90% of offenders sentenced to state prison for drug possession. In 2019, data compiled by the National Academy of Sciences showed that blacks are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than whites.
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader”. These were the words of John Quincy Adams, America’s 6th President. These are times of crisis; and in many people’s opinions, President Donald Trump has not shown an astute leadership in fostering togetherness of the American people. Words leaders speak and tweets they scribble are weighty. They either fuel the fire of division or solder the nation together in love. A true leader must not be a divider but a uniting force. A true leader’s walks and talks must provoke peace and not invoke moves that tear the nation into pieces. A true leader must be tranquil in interventions and peaceable in instructions. A leader without compassion is a leader without compunction.
Americans are still waiting for Trump to lead this greatest nation in the world in times of crisis like what we have today. If unity of faith is impossible, unity of love must be possible. If unity of political ideology is impossible, unity of purpose must be possible. America is hardly perfect. It has its very man faults. But this multi-ethnic, multi-racial and greatest democracy in the world must urgently heal and reform itself.
willieojo@yahoo.com
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