People gather to demand justice for the killing of George Floyd in front of the US consulate in Hamburg, Germany.
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The prejudice in the DNA of too many white Americans is also embedded in the nation’s institutions and deep surgery will be required for real change to happen, writes Rev Prof Peter Storey.
America’s original sin is finally being openly denounced across the world.
Established first in slavery, then institutionalised in Jim Crow and now experienced in regular police killings, mass incarceration and unnumbered other hurts, US racism is front and centre. Demonstrations in more than 100 US cities have spread like a tidal wave far and wide, where thousands are expressing their repugnance for the US and taking the opportunity also to protest homegrown expressions of the same disease.
The most powerful nation in the world has harboured this cancer since its birth without being called to account. One administration after another, state legislators and city governments have colluded to bury America’s shame, but like toxic waste it refuses to stay buried. In spite of all denials, it seeps up again to the surface, poisoning the present and threatening the future.
Millions, black and white, in all 50 states are now crying ‘Enough!’ It is to be hoped that as they confronted massed soldiers and further police brutality, the demonstrators – especially African-Americans – took courage from the outpouring of support in distant places.
What happened in American streets last week is chillingly familiar to those of us who lived through the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Four decades ago, when the power of the apartheid police state bore down ruthlessly on those who defied its policies, our cities also reeked of teargas and echoed to the thud of rubber bullets.
In our case though, live ammunition was often used and sometimes human bodies, not just broken glass and rubble, strewed the streets. That could still happen in America too, in fact it will happen unless the tone-deaf bully now occupying the White House is made to hear what Martin Luther King Jr. called ‘the language of the unheard.’
That is why international outrage is important. Americans are not used to listening to the rest of the world, but they would do well to do so now. Millions of us across the world wept with joy and cheered when for the first time ever a black family entered the White House, not as butlers or housekeepers, but as the First Family. We saw this as something of a redemptive moment, an electoral way of repudiating two centuries and more of white domination and discrimination. The White House had finally become truly the “People’s House” – of all the people.
What we should have known was how deeply that moment was resented by a certain kind of white American. Donald Trump the bullying property mogul and TV celebrity identified fully with that resentment by spending millions of dollars trying to prove that Barack Obama wasn’t an American at all. Then he cynically leveraged white alienation into a run for the Presidency. He launched his campaign with a racist, xenophobic diatribe that we thought would be the end of him, but he knew better than we did: he was tapping into a poisonous vein in the national psyche. White prejudice and fear took him all the way into the White House and redemption was replaced with what racists up and down the USA believed to be righteous – perhaps divine – retribution.
Since then Trumpism has broken every rule in the decency book and has unleashed the pent-up right-wing passions boiling beneath the surface of America.
This President has an unerring instinct for what gives haters their oxygen and he never fails to feed it to them. By his own poorly disguised prejudices and his dangerous tweet storms, he gives permission to the uglier underbelly of American society to assert itself. To the degree that police forces across the US can and do harbour many white racists, outcomes like the killing of George Floyd have been inevitable and have happened, on camera and off with sickening regularity.
The question in many minds is whether this “American Spring”, eclipsing even the outrage following the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr., will lead at last to a truly honest confronting of the nation’s historic flaw. America’s Civil Rights Movement began 65 years ago when a brave African American woman refused to move to the back of a Montgomery bus: “I’m tired,” she said. Will the words “I can’t breathe” this time propel the struggle to a place when the powerful finally listen and real, deep down, lasting systemic change – will be brought about?
While the inclusivity, size and passion of these demonstrations are a hopeful sign, the watching world shouldn’t hold its breath. The prejudice in the DNA of too many white Americans is also embedded in the nation’s institutions and deep surgery will be required for real change to happen. That in turn requires strong political and moral leadership. We South Africans – recalcitrant whites and angry blacks – were given a Nelson Mandela and a Desmond Mpilo Tutu and a host of other selfless leaders to take us through the fire, yet we’re still struggling to excise the heart of our ugly past. How much more difficult in a land where the political landscape seems to have been emptied of leadership?
President Trump is being exposed as a fraud who represents the problem rather than the solution. He is already failing his citizens in their struggle against the Covid-19 virus, let alone even beginning to deal with his own racism, but he has a full five more months at least to flail and make things worse. Joe Biden, his presumptive opponent in the upcoming election is a decent enough person who says the right things, but more often gives the impression of being yesterday’s man. Something truly remarkable will have to emerge out of the present tumult if the wounds in America’s soul are to be healed. Let us pray that it will.
– Rev Prof Peter Storey is former president of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa, past president of the South African Council of Churches, and was Methodist Bishop of the Johannesburg/Soweto area for 13 years. He spent eight years in the USA, and has spoken and taught in more than 130 US cities.
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