Of course Black Lives Matter. And yes, all lives matter, but are all lives affected by police brutality and the fear of it? How striking is that phrase: police brutality. The fact that the joining of those 2 words has become a standard part of the language is revealing of a set of expectations that should shock us into a universal rejection of a certain facet of law enforcement. We need cops. We need to be able to offer them respect and appreciation. We need them not to be killing and otherwise abusing people of color…or anyone else. We need them not to be abusing the extraordinary legal powers we give them so they can properly carry out the tasks society requires of them.
Those abuses are too often manifestations of the racism virus that is endemic and systemic among us. Caucasians need to own that. We can’t change history but we need to pay attention. We must understand how we got to where we are. Not just the awful history of slavery, but the more subtle stuff too…the assumptions masquerading as smug tolerance, the lip service paid to the fiction of equal opportunity. We can’t fix what we don’t recognize. Living under, or next to, a US administration whose prime directive seems to be to promote divisiveness and fear, we should jump at this opportunity to understand each other, to do all the bridge building we can.
