We Can Make America Anew Only If We're Honest About the Depth of the Ugliness and Hate Today [View all]

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

For a few hours (but it felt like days), I watched mostly white men and women ransack the Congress. They climbed walls. Broke doors and windows. Shouting that they were the true patriots. Someone filmed a police officer in riot gear, holding the hand of an older white woman in a camel-haired coat with a red, white, and blue ribbed pom beanie hat with TRUMP emblazoned on the front, as she carefully walked down the steps. She was one of the many who stormed the Capitol building and who simply walked away from the act.

There were no tanks or militarized weapons. No police in army fatigues. No bullhorn warnings to the assembled crowd. As these white men and women engaged in insurrection, no one shot rubber bullets, few police rushed into the crowds to arrest anyone. It was a glaring example of the different quality of their citizenship: that white lives, at least those who claim to be patriots of this sort, matter more than others.

James Baldwin once said, and it was a statement meant to unsettle the listener, that “for Black people in this country there is no legal code at all. We’re still governed by the slave code.” It is a startling image, which, at once, characterizes a form of policing as well as the thinking behind it. In the United States, Black people are meant to be disciplined, corralled and contained, and the violence of police is all too often the primary mechanism by which they are kept in their place.

The point here is not to suggest that Black people are still slaves and that police are slave catchers; rather, Baldwin captures with the image the logic behind why Black people are treated so. The slave code brings into view a host of assumptions about who is valued and who is not, about who has standing in this country and who can be treated, to echo the sentiment of the Dred Scott case, with a generalized sense of disregard.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/we-can-make-america-anew-only-if-we-re-honest-about-the-depth-of-the-ugliness-and-hate-today/ar-BB1cEViS?li=BBnbcA1&ocid=DELLDHP