In my previous column, “Making 2021 better not just new,” a self-identified white reader took exception with my statement about the 70 million voters who would remain obstacles to racial equality and democracy. The reader added that another estimated 70 million or so whites who did not vote for trump have also been obstacles in a passive aggressive way.
Around this time of the year, this country likes to talk about Dr. Martin Luther King but not walk the walk the rest of the year. When Dr. King talked about the “appalling silence of the good people,” he was talking about the well-meaning white people who didn’t cast their vote but were silent in the face of trump’s illegal, unethical and immoral acts for four years.
Where does this leave people of African descent? Always trying to wake up from the American nightmare.
Just days before the failed coup took place in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, Black folks got the news that the Kenosho cop who shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back leaving him paralyzed would not face criminal charges.
The Department of Justice could find no wrongdoing by the police officers who murdered 12-year-old Tamir Rice six years ago.
Already fuming from this kind of relentless assault on Black bodies, most Black folks watched in disgust as the mob of white nationalists stormed the Capitol. For us, there was little difference between them and law enforcers. We know if those had been Black Lives Matter protesters, their bodies would have been piled high around the perimeter of the Capitol grounds and the use of lethal force easily justified. Just as it has been in the cases of thousands of unarmed Black people murdered by white police/people.
After the destruction of the Capitol by the mob of confederate-flag waving white supremacists, it was mainly Black maintenance workers who had to clean up their mess.
This country should’ve learned the painful lesson of how complacency and enabling of the likes of trump create the Hitlers of the world. The sickening part is how these monster-making enablers and financiers are now distancing themselves from what they’ve created.
Thousands of hate-filled tweets later and billions of dollars in their banks, the social media moguls want to suspend his accounts.
We can’t leave out the corporations who are having revelations about the constitutional crises they helped to bankroll. Corps like Amazon, Comcast, Walmart and others are suspending donations to GOP legislators. Life was good when trump was giving them tax cuts and demolishing industry regulations.
The everyday white person doesn’t get a pass because they don’t have the same money or power as a Walmart or a Zuckerberg. They have gone about the business of propping up racism to preserve white privilege in a more quiet and mundane manner.
Then an uprising like Ferguson happens, exposing their collusion with a racially oppressive and exploitative system they benefited from.
Black and Brown people have been put in harm’s way by trump, his noisy collaborators and his quiet abettors. Whether passive or active, those actions fueled the rancorous voices wailing of a stolen election. They all bear responsibility for inciting the seditious behavior of the crazed throng whose aim was to overturn a hard-fought election of a madman who had no business being in control of a country in the first place.
By refusing to tackle the deep-seated roots of white supremacy and racist systems, white America will never come close to Dr. King’s dream of a true democracy for all. What took place on Jan. 6 will be yet another example of two, unequal Americas.