The tragic events that recently occurred in Baton Rouge, Minneapolis and Dallas combine to teach a sad and painful message about the fragility of American society and how far we have not come in
the last half century. The occurrence of the tragedy is the first part of the story. The way in which that tragic set of events has been framed, projected and manipulated, in my view, is the saddest component of this multilayered social tragedy.
It is not enough that we see the wasting of human life through prisms that lend artificial color and meaning to plain black and white facts. It is worst that we fail to even evaluate the totality of the circumstance and instead selectively emphasize the bits and pieces of the story that the media, politicians and elite political interests find special value in emphasizing.
If the reported killing of two Black men in two different states under highly questionable and very suspect sets of circumstances had not been followed by killing of police persons in Dallas, I suspect the news story for the weekend would have been materially different. It would have been pretty much business as usual: just two more Black men who experienced the fate of approximately 500-plus Black people who died at the hands of the police earlier in 2016.
Count back from 2016, and the number quickly becomes impossible to tally. The news headline would have been a call for calm, a promised investigation by some state and federal law enforcement offices and the usual recital of how difficult and dangerous police work happens to be.
The outcome would predictably be what it is in 95 percent of the cases where the police are exonerated, the rationale that the officers experienced a legitimate fear for their lives. The investigation would also find a way to criminalize or attack the character of the victim, after which we await the next case.
The facts surrounding the circumstances of their deaths almost do not matter. The sad and continuing truth is that Black people in America are being systematically lynched in the schools, streets, courts and jails of this great democracy. This is America’s past and this is America’s present. This fact, I argue, is also the largest threat to America’s future.
