Penny Thoughts: We Need Better

by Benjamin B. Ogden, Honors College, University of Southern Mississippi

2020 has been crazy so far, there’s no denying that. 

We started the year with the sudden and shocking death of NBA great Kobe Bryant.  For some it may seem that his death was trivial, but the impact Kobe had on sports in general was arguably unmatched in the sporting world. His death, along with the death of his daughter and seven others, was the harbinger of doom for the year. 

While Kobe Bryant’s death lingered in the news, the coronavirus was being monitored, but not really being worried about. It was China’s problem, right?  It couldn’t possibly spread to the rest of the world. 

We didn’t know how wrong we were.

Come March, we were all at home, leaving the house wearing masks, and wondering when this weird sci-fi-like pandemic would go away.

Come August, we’re still here.  

Mixed in with these storylines of the year, the United States came face to face with the skeleton in the closet that has marred our rich history ever since we became a nation in 1776, racism. 

It started in February with the unjust killing of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed 25-year-old male from Glynn County, Georgia.  Ahmaud was simply jogging, an activity that anyone can attest is not an activity worthy of being shot to death in broad daylight. His shooters, Gregory and Travis McConnell, say that they believed that Arbery was a robbery suspect, but even then, that story is marred in the fact that they assumed an unarmed black man who was jogging was undoubtedly a criminal.  

In March, Breonna Taylor was killed in crossfire between police and her boyfriend Kenneth Walker.  The policemen – Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankinson, and Myles Cosgrove – reportedly came in and announced that they had a warrant for Walker’s arrest. This announcement became a point of contention between the police and Taylor’s family. Both Walker and Taylor were asleep at the time. Walker, confused, either thinking it was a break-in, or, according to the police, just a criminal trying to avoid jail time, opened fire. Taylor got caught in the crossfire and was killed.  

Two months later, a precipitous catalyst for addressing racism in our country was brought upon us. In May, George Floyd, under suspicion of using counterfeit bills to pay for cigarettes, was not only arrested, but was given a knee to the neck by police officer Derek Chauvin. Floyd would die of cardiopulmonary arrest. Floyd was cooperative and calm with the police. Even if he was a criminal, there was no reason the action to kneel on his neck was justified.  

Floyd’s death prompted a series of protests and riots that brought attention to other unjust killings of African Americans by law enforcement officers in our country. One I think is noteworthy is the death of Elijah McClain.  

Elijah McClain reminds me of my sister Zarah – a peaceful soul who would never seek to do harm to others. McClain was a massage therapist who was known for playing the violin and other instruments at animal shelters.  He was placed in a chokehold by the police and was given ketamine to sedate him. The 911 caller stated that he didn’t think anyone was going to be hurt.  He simply reported someone wearing a ski mask. The police – Nathan Woodyard, Jason Rosenblatt, and Randy Roedem – unjustifiably killed McClain.  Anyhow, I hope they all find a nice jail cell to rot in. 

The succession of these unjust killings brought attention to our country’s inherent contradiction. In 1776, we sought to create a nation in which “all men were created equal”. Tragically. but from its inception there was the dichotomy of declaring “equality” yet blindly dependent on slavery to maintain its economy. This dichotomy laid bare the hypocrisy of this obvious contradiction.

In an attempt to confront this hypocrisy, the young nation engaged the bloodiest war in its history, in which over 600,000 died in battle. As a result, slavery was legally banished. Nevertheless, discrimination against African Americans remained rampant throughout the country and was even supported by legal moves which prolonged the sad fact and practice of racism, even though it was assumed to have been resolved.

Nearly 100 years later, Dr. Martin Luther King led the nation in a unified attempt to finally confront this discrimination and end racism.  

However, practices based in fear die a slow and hard death. To this day, we Americans are called to confront our nation’s racist heritage and discuss the racism that is still present in our society. 

The problem, however, is that neither political party has properly addressed racism. 

I consider myself to be an independent voter, and I really think I’d be better off if I were apolitical because I don’t particularly like talking about politics.

But racism transcends politics, and as such the political leaders of the country must address the forces that are bigger than themselves. Maybe that is the problem: politicians are too self-centered or too interested in maintaining their power to understand how important addressing racism is. It must not be a catch phrase every four years with a new election.

Republicans seemingly deny that racism exists. Any time they mention anything regarding the incidents of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, or Elijah McClain, it seems they must begrudgingly accept the reality that our country isn’t doing its job to protect our citizens. They tend to point away from the actual problem. They quote “black-on-black violence” statistics and point to how gun violence in Detroit is awful. Candace Owens, despite being African-American herself, points to these inconsistencies all the time.  

Recently, a five-year-old little White boy named Cannon Hinnant was killed by Darrius Sessions, a Black neighbor, simply because Cannon was on his lawn. It was a swift and violent gunshot to the head.  

Social media, specifically Republican social media, ran to this story to downplay the injustices faced by the Black community – there were no protests for Cannon! There was no outcry! It wasn’t reported by the Main Street Media! If racism were to truly exist, this “obvious” racial crime would have been met with the same outcry!  

Of course, no one is going to mention that Bonny Waddell, the mother of Cannon, says that it was not a racially motivated crime, or that Elijah McClain’s killers and Breonna Taylor’s killers are still walking scot-free. The Republican Party and its followers turn the blind eye to racism. 

On the other hand, the Democratic Party is hypersensitive to racism. From the Democrats’ point of view, just about everything is racist. Are you a Trump supporter? You are a racist. Were you dissatisfied with the Obama presidency? You are a racist. 

In my father’s last article, he went on a tirade about how he believes the Democratic Party’s sole goal is to destroy America – I disagree with this notion – and the comment section, spearheaded by someone I respect due to his intellectual prowess, just dragged my dad through the mud. Though indirect, the message was, “Oh, he is a racist”, and most of the rebuttals were ad hominem.

The word “racist” has been thrown around indiscriminately in today’s Democratic Party. It is repackaged McCarthyism. Back then it was communism. Now, it is racism.  

Think about this.  How many times have you seen a politician be called a racist? It happens on both sides, but the Democratic Party and its followers just love to throw the word around. 

It is what drowned Hillary Clinton in 2016.  Tell me, if someone called you a racist over and over until you got their vote, would you vote for them? Probably not, especially if you are not a racist. You are not going to vote for a party that labels you as the lowest common denominator of humankind until they get what they want out of you. That is why Trump won. 

While the Republicans see nothing as racist, the Democrats see everything as racist. There is no middle ground.  

We need better from the people who are supposed to be leading us.  This year, we have Donald Trump, someone who will never grasp the concept of racism in America, against Joe Biden, who, similar in age to Trump, is a senile old man who is a pain to listen to who also won’t get anything done as regards addressing real racial injustice.

We need another Lincoln. Someone who planned to make amends for past terrors. You ever wonder why we have these confederate statues in our parks?  Because the North began to sympathize with the South after the Civil War and never sought a real unity of the Nation. This seemed to justify the sad notion of the “Lost Cause” but was really an extension of the racism which permeated America as a whole.  

Lincoln was well on his way to rebuilding the South. However, John Wilkes Booth ended the dream of reconstruction, and in came Andrew Johnson, one of the worst, if not the worst, presidents in our history. 

Johnson failed at reconstructing the South to the point that the Confederacy, a nation that was fighting for the single most morally corrupt institution in our nation’s history, started to sound like a pretty good idea to the people living in the South. So, the South started erecting statues depicting the “heroes” of the “lost cause.”  

The root of our nation’s racism was our nation’s fear and ignorance.

I adamantly believe that if Lincoln had not been killed, racial tensions in America would be significantly less prominent. The South would have been rebuilt, and the “Lost Cause” movement would never have existed. 

We as a nation have yet to fulfill the ideal our Founders set forth in 1776, that all men are created equal.  We must fulfill that ideal. 

Racism will never be defeated with the system we have in place – a system with two sides that either deny racism or accuse anything possible of being racist – a system that doesn’t understand what racism continues to do to our Nation.

We need better than what we have nominated in the last two elections. We need someone who can unify our nation, not divide it. We need someone who is a realist, not someone who lives in the grandeur of his wealth and seems blind to a nation with no flaws. We need someone who understands what racism is, not an old man whose vice president might be picking a vice president for herself in the short-term future. 

We just need better. 

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of The West Alabama Watchman.