Dahlia Lithwick: Why This Time Is Different

[babylonsister]

Why This Time Is Different
Years of polite protests against Donald Trump could not do what this movement might accomplish.
By Dahlia Lithwick
June 02, 20204:11 PM


snip//

The paradox of the Trump presidency is and has always been that Trump is tiny, far too tiny to matter, and also that he is at the epicenter of everything. The central koan of the Trump era was always How did someone so small come to matter so much? And because “don’t pay attention” doesn’t work when the guy you’re meant to be ignoring has the nuclear codes, it was a loop from which we couldn’t extricate ourselves. So long as we believed that Trump was the cause of the problem, we were doomed to our civil outings around Foley Square, as the police stood mildly by, and guys sold quirky anti-Trump buttons from pushcarts.

But Trump was never the cause of the problem; he is the result of the problem. As Bryan Stevenson explains (for the thousandth time), there is not one single thing about the death of George Floyd that is remarkable or new. Not the killing in plain sight, not the complicity of the officers on site, and not the fact that it was captured on video. “Everything we are seeing is a symptom of a larger disease,” Stevenson says. “We have never honestly addressed all the damage that was done during the two and a half centuries that we enslaved black people. The great evil of American slavery wasn’t the involuntary servitude; it was the fiction that black people aren’t as good as white people, and aren’t the equals of white people, and are less evolved, less human, less capable, less worthy, less deserving than white people.” The killings of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or Ahmaud Arbery all could have happened in the Obama administration. Killings did happen then. The fact that the current president has praised Nazis and given succor to white supremacists didn’t cause this week’s mass protests; it merely coincides with them.

Because Donald Trump is so laugh-out-loud absurd, so vain and fussy and so lacking in substance, protesting him was never quite serious. It was important, yes, and the policies he has enacted do real harm to real people, harm that should be loudly denounced. But these protests always had a bit of a street festival quality to them: Look at the silly carnival barker and laugh at his bad spelling and his bad hair and his poor captive wife. Even as he was stealing migrant children from their parents and locking them in iceboxes, the fundamental stupidity of the president was still center stage. But even these protests, often featuring tens of thousands of protesters, didn’t break through precisely because the predominantly white people in them could fist-bump the cops as we politely and whimsically strolled by.

Most Americans intuitively understand that Donald Trump, with his failures of cognition or compassion and his incomplete theory of mind, was a symptom and not a cause of America’s original, founding sin. Protesting a symptom occupied us for a while. But protesting the sin itself is what has finally brought people to the streets, in a sustained and combustible way. Why bother protesting a reality show when reality itself is a daily nightmare? Long before the advent of the Donald Trump presidency, Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues declared America “over” its racism problem. Long before the advent of the Trump presidency, police departments were hiding evidence of wrongdoing and exonerating and protecting the worst malefactors.

Now, law enforcement is armed with military weapons, military leaders are parading around D.C. in uniform, the free press is being punched, and protesters are being tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed by state actors who insist there was no tear gas or pepper spray. Just as the coronavirus again instructed us all on how America’s racism savages black lives and black livelihoods disproportionally, these protests are a master class in the same. The brokenness is centuries in the making.


more...

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/why-george-floyd-protests-are-different.html

[malaise]

1. It's also different because 106,000+ died from Covid-19, the majority

of whom are African-American, Latino and indigenous people.

[stillcool]

2. boy, oh boy...

that last paragraph got me. Thanks...good read.

Donald Trump is going to make everything that was already bad much, much worse in the days to come. But we aren’t just spectators anymore. There are no orange Cheeto signs on the streets because he was the culmination of a centuries long sickness, not the cause of it. This moment is not about him, but about what created him, and whether we can finally break the spell

[MyOwnPeace]

3. Very powerful insights....

a call to focus on what really matters and what we need to do to make things "OK" again - and it ain't gonna' be easy.

Still, and even more so, MOST IMPORTANT: GET OUT THE VOTE!!!!!!!!

[Solly Mack]

4. Racism/white supremacy is the root. All the rest branches

on the gnarled and corrupted tree of racism.