This Timing is Not Coincidental
The one-two punch of failed pandemic response — and continuously failing society itself — is waking people up to the disease that is the establishment and the right-wing responsible for Trump.
What happened to George Floyd is not unique. Even in the context of being concurrent with Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery it is not unique; Breonna Taylor was fatally shot after what’s effectively a police-sanctioned home invasion in late March, just when most of the country was entering “lockdown”. Ahmaud Arbery was murdered in February before even John Oliver and Last Week Tonight thought it fashionable to cover CoV-SARS-V2 in any form.
But the fact that this is occurring in the middle of a global pandemic, or at least retrospective of it, that has disproportionately effected not only the United States as a whole but in particular the country’s Indigenous and People of Color is what is unique. There are several paths to this intersection but all of those routes are closely related to a larger ill growing ever more pervasive within the country: the heteronormaltive, patriarchal, white biased if not outright supremacist and hyper-capitalist status quo establishment as actively championed and preserved by the conservative right-wing and officially manifest and recognized in the form of the Republican Party and its current official figurehead, Donald J. Trump.
But it would be remissive, if not perpetuating the very problem, to place the blame on Trump. As I’ve been saying as a recurring theme, Trump is a symptom, not the problem. Few if any of the policies enacted by Trump are unique to him, including the wall and concentration camps for undocumented people, but rather the Republican Party mainstream. What truly makes Trump unique is that he proved to the Party that these capitalist-supremacist ideas and proposals can be openly mainstream and not hurt the Party; infact help boost it just enough to lead it and Trump straight to the White House.
The roots of this systemic capitalist, anti-democratic and racial supremacy go back to the very roots of the country itself.
Which is why it’s frustrating seeing this continuously persist, whether from an outside observer looking in, especially one that may not be the most informed about the Person of Color experience in the United States and from a particular position of foreign privilege himself but is nonetheless strangely propped up by a certain social media news platform (namely, this one, the one you are reading right now) or even from a nonetheless still foreign (and white) perspective embedded into American society for years, one that is also propped by the wealthiest telecommunications corporations exerting some of the greatest control over media consumption, no matter how much he insists on “biting the hand that feeds him”. Let alone to those who are forced to live through this on a daily basis, for whom being “informed” on this is an inseparable part of their life experience. Some of whom just also happen to be on television.
What had happened to Floyd, Taylor and Arbery indeed does happen every day in the U.S. These incidents are not something that had suddenly stopped immediately after the Ferguson protests and the murder of Michael Brown, been absent for six years and suddenly flared up again with coronavirus.
But coronavirus/COVID-19, the aforementioned disproportionate effects against Communities of Color, and frustration against the Trump government’s response to the pandemic and, again, the very fact that Trump had been appointed leader of the nation by a minority of the voting population, all collectively proved to be the last straw this time around.
If anything, pandemic and infection risks aside, now is the perfect time to protest.
Now is the time to remind the nation and the world that the failures of the nation and pandemic response are absolutely tied to the continuous injustices of Communities of Color, including to undocumented peoples held at border concentration camps. The very same policies and attitudes that have been complicit in and allowed one have also done so for the other. And, to continually beat the drum on the point, this is not unique to Trump. The entire party, including several key senators, representatives and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell himself share these same attitudes, not simply being yes-men to Trump. Trump himself is merely emulating the great Republican Party hero, Ronald Reagan, who made a point to make racism an explicit part of American domestic and foreign policy and who didn’t just popularize but practically invented the term “welfare queen” as part of a larger campaign specifically to deny People of Color basic, rudimentary access to fundamental government services that not even Reagan himself would deny to white people.
But again, the intersection of a literally once-in-a-century pandemic into the literally daily occurring injustices of all communities but most pronounced and damaging into Communities of Color is what makes these protests unique. It is precisely that pandemic that has forced white communities to “shelter-in-place” to realize that issues that affect People of Color, issues that kill People of Color also affect their lives, can also kill them. That even their white, privileged lives are in the hands of a voting minority, tricked by an smaller, by magnitudes, wealthy oligarch of powerful white men represented and indeed personified by Trump, but not lead by him. As much as I question and even criticize umair haque for being an outsider, and for not understanding the Person of Color experience in this country, he does have an especially salient point — as what’s supposed to be the very model of modern Democracy, the United States needs a Spring Uprising against these rich, powerful and narrow interests.
