Hermit Diary 27: A Summer Already Ablaze

At Barack Obama's inauguration, Washington D.C., January 2009

 

The year was 1968. On April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Two months later, in June, Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. senator and former attorney general who had campaigned for civil rights his entire career, was also killed by an assassin. The Vietnam War was raging; the country deeply divided, angry, and hopeless. After Dr. King died, riots erupted in all the major cities, and continued. Like 2020, 1968 was also an election year. The Democratic convention, held in Chicago in August, was the scene of a massive clash between 10,000 anti-war demonstrators and 23,000 National Guardsmen, called in by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Later, the independently-headed "Walker Report," appointed to study and report on what had happened, said:

"...(there was) unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions, particularly at night. That violence was made all the more shocking by the fact that it was often inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat. These included peaceful demonstrators, onlookers, and large numbers of residents who were simply passing through, or happened to live in, the areas where confrontations were occurring."

“Individual policemen, and lots of them, committed violent acts far in excess of the requisite force for crowd dispersal or arrest. To read dispassionately the hundreds of statements describing at firsthand the events of Sunday and Monday nights is to become convinced of the presence of what can only be called a police riot.”

I was 16 then and already a committed activist; I remember it all very well. The summer of 1968 was when it all boiled over, but the violence continued right through 1970, when the Kent State Massacre -- in which four innocent students were shot and killed -- finally seemed to mark a turning point in the protests against the war. Those of us who were alive then cannot forget Richard Nixon's unpalatable policies, and how his rightwing, law-and-order rhetoric fueled these confrontations -- but Donald Trump is orders-of-magnitude worse.

In spite of all that has happened since, no period of time I've experienced has come close to matching the frustration, anger, tension, fear, suffering, and deep sadness of those years, until now. 2020 is going to go down in history too. And it's going to be a long, hot summer.

Fifty years, and it feels like white people have learned nothing. Nothing. When are we going to wake up and make not only the systemic changes that need to happen, but start to address the wrongs that have been done? Will there EVER be a Truth and Reconciliation process in the United States? I very much doubt it, not with governments like the present one, which encourage and promote hatred, seek to turn their own people against each other, and have empowered and emboldened right-wing white supremacists, fascists, and the most conservative elements within police, military, and border-control forces. But the roots of racism in America run so deep that not even a black president of impeccable character and eloquence could make significant inroads against it. Now, not only do we have police killing blacks on the streets, and a justice system stacked against them, we have black and ethnic minority people dying in hugely disproportionate numbers from the virus, while they also serve in a disproportionate number of low-paying and dangerous jobs in health care and the service sectors -- not to mention the countless other injustices to which they are subject.

Here in Canada, I've observed the Truth and Reconciliation process with the indigenous community. Although America has perpetrated even more injustices, including genocide, against its native people, this did not feel like "my" issue when I moved here; because of the time when I grew up, I was more concerned, more familiar, and more invested in the struggles for civil rights, women's rights, peace and nuclear disarmament, gender equality, and the rights of immigrants and religious and ethnic minorities -- all of which had been major issues in the United States during my lifetime.  But I have seen the painful steps toward truth-telling and reconciliation here, as well as in South Africa, and I believe that this is the ONLY way to begin to redress the wrongs that have been done, and to bring a society into greater understanding.

Yet in Canada, in spite of believing that we're better than our neighbors to the south, we have our share of racism and hatred, especially directed against Muslims and Jews. Just this week, in one of the worst attacks in recent memory, a synagogue here in Montreal was violently ransacked, its religious objects desecrated -- a Torah had been cut up and stuffed into a toilet -- the floors covered in red paint, and the walls with antisemitic graffiti.

Meanwhile, the poor, and people of color and of ethnic minorities are dying at higher rates of COVID-19, while they fill a greater number of poorly-paid service and health care jobs. The same Quebec government which recently threw out three years of immigrant applications just had the gall to start a new fast-track program for immigrants who are willing to come here and work in the deplorable care homes for the elderly, where the virus has spread like wildfire, resulting in 80% of the deaths in the province. The message is clear: we didn't want you before, but now we need you to take care of us, so we'll make you a deal.

We white people of conscience have no choice: we have to stand for justice and against racism in all of its forms, against violence, against oppression, and for equality for all people regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual preference. And you know what? It is not the job of black people, or Muslims, or Jewish people, Asians, Arabs, or any other minority group, to educate us about why their lives matter, and what needs to be done. It's our job, and we had damn well better get on with it.

Comments

[Natalie]

Beth, thanks for focusing on this urgent issue in your usual attentive and heartfelt way. This latest outrage against a human being who happened not to be white, as well as the appalling actions of that woman in Central Park against a not-white man, as well as the ongoing racism which keeps on thriving in the USA and elsewhere, I feel such rage that I can well understand a crowd of protesters setting fire to things even though, of course, it results in brutal retaliation and condemnation from the misfit who sits in the White House tweeting his so-called Presidency.

I don't understand why the Democratic Party and/or others who are aware and deeply concerned, are not organising huge, effective, efficient and totally legal public actions against the poison of racism and all its effects around the country. Those who perpetrate it, defend it or tolerate it or pretend it doesn't exist are not going to change.

[Duchesse]

I was in the midst of the 1968 events you describe, a student at a large university near Detroit, and participated in actions sponsored by a militant anti-war organization. Even before the time you describe were the Detroit Riots of summer 1967, similar to the current riots.This current incident, yet another murder of a black person by a white policeman. (I do not understand why the charge is 3d degree manslaughter.) The public can march, but when the justice system is this dysfunctional, such citizens' outrage are necessary but not sufficient.

[Blork]

A long hot summer indeed.

The United States is like a huge, lumbering ocean liner with a lot of momentum keeping it moving in a straight line. Like an ocean liner, it cannot turn on a dime, and the Obama years amounted to the captain ordering a long, slow turn. Then Trump came in with his unexpected mutiny and cancelled everything just as the rudder was starting to kick in.

It saddens me when people blame the Obama administration for not doing enough. Under the circumstances, it did as much as it could, I think, under the circumstances. It should have been the beginning of the beginning of real change, something that would take many years to really play out. But the whole thing was scuttled before it got a chance to get going.

[John Matheson]

The soundtrack for today's events has already been written.
The first song is "Who's side are you on?"
Hopefully it may be clear that entrism into old-line political parties is an exercise in futility. It does not work for Labour or the NDP, and it will not work with the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party may in fact be the thing holding the whole white supremacist state together. They certainly have a history of it, and "Cracker Joe" Biden (as they are calling him on Twitter) did not seem to learn. The Democratic Party is going to distract and suppress real activists and con them into thinking that a political agenda will make it through the terminally deadlocked congress.
The only thing that fascists understand is superior force. That is the only thing that makes them crawl back into the holes from which they came.