Vacillating Between Hope and Fear

I vacillate between hope and fear. For example, I saw that hundreds of people in my former Connecticut home town were protesting the killing of George Floyd. That brought hope, but I remembered the fights over low-income housing in the town. It's a town who has zoning restrictions that keeps most people in the lower economic scale out of town. It's a town whose residents avoid coming to my side of town, the one closest to Bridgeport, the area where people of color shopped. It's a town where a neighbor called the police because four blacks kids were playing basketball in my backyard with my sons.

Protesting is easy. Change is hard.

Atlanta's Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said it better in a New York Times column today:

I frantically screamed into the phone to my teenage son: “Lance, WHERE ARE YOU?!”

Social media posts were swirling that protests were being planned in Atlanta in response to the death of George Floyd, a black Minnesotan, while a police officer knelt on his neck.

Although as mayor, the chief of police reports to me, in that moment, I knew what every other parent to a black child in America knows: I could not protect my son. To anyone who saw him, he was simply who he is, a black man-child in the promised land that we all know as America.

I know that as a mayor of one of the largest cities in our country, I should now be offering solutions. But the only comforting words I have to offer so far are those that I know to be most true: that we are better than this; that we as a country are better than the barbaric actions that we are forced to keep watching play out on our screens like a grotesque horror movie stuck on repeat. We are better than the hatred and anger that consumes so many of us. We are better than this deplorable disease called racism that remains so rampant.

I now share some of her feelings about her son for my grandsons are African American. Mayor Bottoms is correct. We are better than the hatred and anger. We are better than this deplorable disease called racism.  We also are a society that used Christianity and obtuse republican (reference to the political philosophy, not the party) notion of governance to justify slavery and later Jim Crow. With those justifications, horror rained down on African Americans while European Americans sat at home around the fireplace, radio, or television, oblivious to it all. European Americans are better than that. What will shake them from the complacency? What will force them to take political and economic action? The death of George Floyd? Maybe, maybe not. Trayvon Martin's demise did nothing as was the case with Ahmaud Arbery's and Breonna Taylor's deaths. (I mention only these three, because they happened between March 1 and May 15 2020.) Or maybe the death of James Shurlock. He died Monday night.

I am waiting for hope to return.