We Must Be Free of Fear and Full of Hope

A pandemic more lethal than Covid-19 is convulsing America now. It is the pandemic of weaponized racism. 

We have all been traumatized by the video of life seeping out of George Floyd in real time as a Minneapolis policeman pressed his knee on his neck and cuts off his air supply. “I can’t breathe,” Floyd pleaded in his dying moments. In response, the white police office casually put his left hand in his pocket, adjusted his knee for maximum force, and kept the pressure on until George Floyd literally breathed his last.

In just the last few years we have seen several African-Americans paying the ultimate price at the hands of police and vigilantes for no fault other than having the ‘wrong’ shade of skin. Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Laquan McDonald, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Botham Jean, Amadou Diallo, Freddie Gray, Sam Dubose, Terence Crutcher, Jamar Clark ... the list goes on and on.

Tommie Smith (won the gold medal in the 200-meter sprint finals in 19.83 seconds, first time the 20-seconds barrier was broken) and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists during the medal ceremony in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics as symbols of Black Power and Human Dignity.

Statues of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the Campus of
San Jose State University, their alma mater. Photo by Hasan Z Rahim

Fifty two years later, not only has nothing changed, it has become worse for African-Americans, particularly after Trump's rise to power.

How many of us can really feel in our guts the existential threat African-Americans experience every time they venture out to go the grocery store, to the local Starbucks, or to watch birds in a park, wondering, "Will I return alive from this outing?"

We have regressed to the extent that we keep asking ourselves, Is this America?

Police and vigilante brutality against minorities, particularly African-Americans, has reached par with the Apartheid at its worst in South Africa six decades or so ago, even though white supremacy was written into the South African constitution, not in the U.S. Constitution.

But words are cheap. What happens on the ground is reality; hallowed words are not.

Will Gandhi's non-violence work in America? Will Martin Luther King's? Will Thoreau be our guide?

That we are forced to raise these questions show the depth to which America has fallen under Trump and his enablers. The status quo has got to change.

The knee against the neck, against the jugular veins of an entire race, cutting off oxygen, surely cannot continue indefinitely. Something's gotta give. George Floyd was not an anomaly. He was the normal.

Fear has gripped us all. But fear can only create flimsy institutions. If whites band together for Trump because they fear "others" will become majority and take over everything, well, almost everything, that was "rightfully" theirs, then we will end up with a fractured country so stark that it will consist of nothing but bits and pieces, shards that are easily weaponized.

I am brown and Muslim and I say, along with millions of my fellow-Americans irrespective of color or faith, that we must be free of fear and full of hope for America not just to survive but thrive.

If we can aspire to that, we can say George Floyd did not die in vain.

May we all wake up to the light of decency and good governance on 4^th November, 2020.