Editor’s note: This commentary is by Lilly L. Salvia, a writer and retired teacher who lives in Wolcott.
The injustices being perpetrated against Black citizens have been captured on camera and have energized the Black Lives Matter movement. But I fear, if enough time passes, without convincing legal challenges to the status quo having been adopted, one more opportunity to confront the assumptions by which those in power rule will be lost. The only way to prevent that from happening is for each of us to embrace viscerally the fact, Black Lives really do Matter. Not at a distance, but as a statement of conviction that resides deep within each of us.
This movement is where the struggle for the soul of our country is in evidence right now — and the struggle is each of ours, whether one is Black, white, male, female, Indigenous, immigrant, old, young, Asian, Muslim. The fact is, most every group of citizens has at one time or another been profiled and harassed in this country.
As individuals we have the capacity for love and kindness, but as a community we have shown ourselves also to be deluded, arrogant, and completely removed from the workings of the natural order of the planet. The list of atrocities we’ve committed over time is appallingly long. The genocide involving Indigenous peoples, the slave trade, the Jim Crow laws and lynchings, the treatment of women as chattel, the shooting to extinction, or near extinction of the passenger pigeon, Eskimo curlew, and buffalo, the poisoning of our water, air, and land for profit — on and on and on. These are not anomalies, nor are they symptoms — these acts represent choices made – this is who we have been and are, as a people and a society.
But we don’t have videos of the police coercing sex from women, as they enforced the “American Plan,” which were a set of nationwide laws, allowing the police to arrest any woman they might deem to be “loose,” hold them without recourse, and send them to an asylum for “treatment.” We don’t have videos of the Chinese citizens of Seattle being dragged from their homes and loaded onto a ship with the intent of setting it afire. No film was shot of Chivington’s troops parading through Denver, displaying the body parts of the Southern Cheyenne they’d just massacred at Sand Creek. And as such our reactions, as a people, to these and other historical examples of brutality and prejudice continue as an ongoing series of rationalizations and denials.
But in the present, what we do have to document the unrelenting violence and injustice perpetrated by the mindset that has underlain this country’s policies and unspoken biases are videos of unarmed Black people being killed by police officers – the same officers of the law who enforced the same unjust laws in the same deadly ways down through this country’s history — the same officers who acted with the same societal mindset of the voters and legislators who supported those laws, and which has divided our world into “us” and “them.”
Those in power have always understood, the way to retain their position is to compel or seduce those who are venal or feel under threat to do their enforcing for them. Create suspicion, foment a sense of grievance, and point a finger to name a threat, and then let the mob take it from there. We, citizens and police officers alike, have to stop being that mob and instead turn our attention away from those who would divide us by inflicting scars and encouraging us to shout our remonstrance among ourselves even as we squabble over who is more deserving of justice.
Somehow, in some way, we need not merely to deflect or alter the course of our historical trajectory, but to halt it and reimagine it. By focusing our attention on racism, because that is what is up now, we open the way for addressing the myriad other isms that plague our daily lives. Which is why it’s absolutely critical for all of us to break from our assumptions, prejudices, and ego-driven need to be seen as “good,” and begin to listen and learn about the world through which Black people move.
As a White woman, my experience is very different from a Black man’s, or a Black woman’s for that matter, on so many levels. But what we have in common is a need to put an end to injustice and inequality. If those in power are allowed to denigrate, harass, or disparage any of us, in time they will surely do it to all of us. Black Lives do Matter; this is the fight before us at this moment; and as such this is my fight.
