What a time to be alive, 2020.
As if trying to avoid contracting a global pandemic were not traumatic enough, African-Americans have had to come to grips with reports that our people are disproportionately affected by the Coronavirus. For instance, according to NPR, whose investigative reporters evaluated demographic data collected by the COVID Racial Tracker, “Nationally, African-American deaths from COVID-19 are nearly two times greater than would be expected based on their share of the population. In four states, the rate is three or more times greater.”
On top of that, images of Black men being brutally slaughtered by the police (and vigilantes) are being streamed into our homes with alarming frequency, bringing to mind the “slave patrols,” from which modern American policing descended.
Historian Gary Potter reports that slave patrols existed for three main reasons: “(1) To chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside the law.”
Sound familiar?
To be sure, as a result of the rash of police killings over the past few weeks, the names Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Rayshard Brooks are now singed in our collective psyche.
The cops who burst, unannounced, into Breonna Taylor’s home and shot her at least eight times, as she slept in her bed in the middle of the night, were reportedly–and conveniently–not wearing body cameras. So, mercifully–and tragically–that is one snuff film that will not be played like an endless loop for the consumption of a horrified, quarantined, thus captive, global audience.
