The spark of this USA turned global movement was another episode of racial injustice in America. George Floyd another Black man murdered by a White police officer with others watching the homicide. Reminiscent , it is horribly enough, of the traditional lynch mob days where white crowds would gather with their picnic baskets and cameras anxious to take home little pieces of the anticipated murdered Black usual body for souvenirs indeed heirlooms.
But there has been something different about this lynching episode with a white limb on the Black neck rather than hanging the Black neck from the limb of a tree. The expected at best local Black uproar with conciliatory neo-liberal White and Black elected officials declaring as they usually do saying justice will be done which seldom happens to murdering cops today or historically became the unexpected. The lynching this time became a national and now global event of massive protests everywhere. The President in the White House is dangerously pandering to his White nationalist base rather than paying attention to what people of all ages, classes, and ancestries in the streets in America and around the world. Police chiefs are kneeling and holding hands with protesters and so did the Prime Minister of Canada. Retired military commanders more than likely the mouthpieces of those on-duty forbidden to speak are urging reconciliation and justice. Their urgings are counter to the sterner military measures President Trump threatened to employ though thank goodness in recent days is beginning to pivot from more than likely due to behind the scenes resistance from the military high command and from members of his own party and his own political base who too are out there marching.
It is the first time this has ever happened in American history and global history at that have ao massively taken to the streets demanding justice for Blacks and for all of us. Superseding what we saw going on in the 1950s and 1960s.People are just sick and tired. Younger generations have nothing to look forward to since Baby boomers have left them with virtually nothing except debts and now this virus thing devastating the little crumbs left for then to squander. We older people having nothing to boast of either strapped with meager pensions and healthcare and no decent housing and our support systems are lousy. At best we are like the 70 something year old protestor in Buffalo, New York the other day knocked down to pavement by the police left there bleeding. Only a video clipped made it clear he did not as the cops said fell down you know as we older people are habitually supposed to do. We older people in America these days are disposable as the virus sweeping through nursing homes is saying in a society with young people who are tired of not knowing which way they are going.
Every one out there on the streets and their supporters off the streets where ever they are expressing not having enough to make ends meet and even when you do have means be it taxes or high consumer prices we are barely scrapping. Meanwhile the wealthy few even have the nerve to grab pandemic government funds allocated to the poor. They pay little tax and live like kings and queens while most of us are honest hard working people or hard at looking for work to live lives below poverty. Graduates working their heads off and their hearts out burning midnight oil lanterns until they melt or corrode find nothing like job waiting for them. Youth and older people in America used to have factories and places like gas stations to work in are now finding robots and off shore phone and online laborers taking their places.
Be it Democratic or Republican our two party system is torn to threads with the two Presidential contenders Trump there in the White House and Biden wanting to be there posing as symptoms of the rotting White Supremacy electoral constitutional laws and traditions. Both sides like the founding fathers of this now declining White Supremacy Male nation state are desperately holding on to traditions, to rules, and regulations assuring White Male Supremacy with White women and Non-White men and women being used as their beck and call. Those days are over as the street filled marches are occurring even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic virus. Assuring speeches for peace on both sides of the aisle are doing no good. That includes the soothing words of Republican Condi Rice and Democratic Barack Obama who as Black national political leaders when they were in office did not so as much as they could do about racial justice. So hardly no one is listening to them now as well as the bleeding white neo- liberal types, especially the young with no model of courageous racial justice leadership in sight in either of the two traditional parties.
What the street protests which will not soon end are all about are possibly five things. First some retired military and intelligence and prominent media commentator are drawing comparisons between the near collapse of politically traumatized nations around the world and what has been going on in America the last two weeks. The fear is Trump’s erosion of military independence through installing his yes people in the Pentagon is at a point now the military will buckle under and agree to deploying military troops to be used against protesting American citizens.
Second , some say Trump’s tough law and order stance is a re-election strategy to feed his base. If he wins the protests will more than likely continue more than likely exacerbated by a second wave of COVID-19 pandemic virus, Trump will further push the military into becoming a dictator. If Trump loses , he could refuse to leave office challenging the results in court throwing the country into a novel constitutional crisis.
Third , related to the second possibility is Trump using the military to postpone November elections with the strategy to bully his way into a second term. This would allow him to tighten his grip on the military and continue to stack the Supreme Court and the entire federal system. That is, if the Republican Party continues to hold on to the Senate after November which controls federal judicial appointments and checks Presidential military powers.
Four, others speculate that the convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and massive racial justice and police reform movements are sowing the seeds for a third party with winning capacity; In a declining White Supremacy Male nation.
Even if probable Democratic Party Presidential nominee Joe Biden chooses moderate Kamala Harris or another African American woman as his running mate as predicted it will continue to destroy the party from within with its elitist neo-liberal inclinations. Even if he wins his old fashioned White Supremacy Male neoliberalism will not be enough to sustain a coalition of the growing power of younger white and especially non-white Democratic and independent voters along with disgruntled Republicans and usual nonvoters.
If Trump wins re-election, it will be because in the face of Democratic Party nonvoters ,he is able to fire up his Mid-Western and Southern White bases along with his non-White evangelical and conservative supporters enough to , as in 2016, win the Electoral College vote while not necessarily the popular vote not needed to win the Presidency in the American system.
Whoever wins in November 2020 , some speculate, will represent one of the two traditional parties which will face a third party in mid-term 2022 and in the Presidential 2024 year. This party will be a Post-White Supremacy galvanizing presently composed of Americans disillusioned by the marginal and failed racial and class reform policies across Democratic and Republican administrations since the 1990s creating a deepening disenfranchised multiracial impoverished underclass and middle class in a nation becoming nonwhite with no traditional Party leadership in sight with skills to lead an authentic post-White Supremacy nation. Its dress rehearsal was the 2018 Midterm election which dramatically changed the gender and racial demographics of the House of Representatives. The White Supremacy attitudes of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the left towards younger women of color in her caucus along with the conformity leanings of the older Blacks and Latinos House leaders actually paved the way for White Supremacist Trump to attack them from the right. This is certainly creating conditions for third party breakaways especially if Trump wins and moves further to the right with the Democratic Party standing by hopeless and toothless. The fifth view is this civil rights movement we are now experiencing in America is not just about America. This is more than apparent in its massive presence in other big Western and Non-Western cities and in rural areas. In this respect something bigger than “race” is going on.It is global soul searching and the redemption of our societal souls. It is a global movement atonement for the sociological sides of societal sins- slavery both historical and modern, colonialism, environmental destruction, racism, the dehumanization of girls and women, poverty induced by the greed of the wealthy, and other massive forms of degradation and suffering though we human beings are one made in the image of God. It is this fifth meaning of this civil rights movement birthed by COVID-19 pandemic which needs most our undivided attention as a world since searching our souls and recovering our singular humanity is going to be the only way we human beings will not only survive but prosper. This includes Africa where like Asia is now in the centerfold of global power and prestige though still needs to be awakened and contend with such serious forms of structural inequalities which need more transparent discussion and effective intervention and positive transformation. Â
Otherwise no matter what we say with such eloquent words and powerpoints in our fancy conference and corporate suite garments remain irrelevant trinkets of nothingness as the soul searching world leaves Africans behind…once again.
