On May 25, George Floyd, another human life, was senselessly and cruelly taken by police officers in Minneapolis. The way he was killed was so horrifying that you can’t even watch it for its entirety at once without taking your eyes off of the screen to regain strength to watch it. I am not sharing the footage here but you sure can find it on Youtube. This is happening in America day after day, month after month, year after year, and decades after decades and for centuries. Black lives are not considered as a human life like other human races, especially when it comes to White race. This has been proved by fact again and again.
As usual, there were protests, news coverages, and statements from “Big shots figures”. Democrat Presidential candidate Joe Biden has issued strong statements, President Obama had also weighed in by releasing a statement and, with no surprise, President Donald Trump has posted on Twitter, in his typical fashion, a racially toxic message to go after the “Thugs”.
Do you see the similarity of the repeated cycle of it? It happened hundreds or thousands of time in last few years.
Do you believe that the Black men and women are killed in this manner that many times only? Albeit not!
These are only times when a cell phone videos or recordings come out on public and people see the horrific encounter of it where people can’t spin the story. Just recently I saw another video where a Black man was jogging on the street and stopped by a White man and his son and shot and killed on clear day light. Prior to the release of a bystander’s video, they had claimed that the Black man had attacked them and they shot him out of fear of their life. This “shot out of fear of life” is a typical statement just like in Bangladesh where a person is shot and killed in a “crossfire” during a raid. So, these were all happening for very long time but as now, we actually can see the real incident on cell phone videos on Youtube where the killer can’t make up their own false stories, we get outraged. Had we not seen the real footage, we would tend to believe the White men’s recount of the story as we have deeply rooted bias against Black man. This racial biases is not just there in White people but I have seen this in brown people as well. That hurts me more. But that’s the reality of human psychology where, for instance, people at work who are mistreated by managers tend to mistreat their subordinates.
Make no mistake that enough talk and enough things would be said about this incident as well. And that would continue for some days or weeks without any real change. Trayvon Martin, a kid in Florida, was killed senselessly by a White vigilante and President Obama had cried for him on the Whitehouse podium and nothing happened and nothing changed whatsoever. So why do you think that now with our “great” president Donald Trump, things will come out very differently and we will solve the racism in America this time once and for all? I know you would also agree that things will remain same this time as well.
Many of experts are talking about changing the rules, changing the police trainings etc. But, don’t we remember that we have civil right law passed in 1960s and half a century later, where are we standing on the civil rights? Yes, some progress had been made but the deep rooted racial injustice is still there and, to some extent, growing. So, you would agree that the law and civic awareness of non-Black people can’t change it alone. Do you know that even the Machine Learning models that are built today are biased against Black (and minority) populations? Why so? Because the Machine Learning algorithms learn from the data available in the society and reflects to that pattern of social biases. So, it tells us on why the generations after generations of one race are racially biased against another race (in this case against Black race).
So, is there any way out of this? To me, it doesn’t look like by looking into the past data unless we change the rule of the game. If we look deep and look carefully, a potential answer may be found in the current statistics of COVID-19 death. Just look at this below stats (according to CDC):
- Nearly 23% of reported Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. are African American as of May 20, even though Black people make up roughly 13% of the U.S. population, according to the data.
- In Michigan, Black people make up nearly 14% of the population and account for roughly 39% of deaths.
Why so?
Why Corona virus disproportionately killing Black people in America than White or other races? Is Corona virus a racist virus?
Can we create a law against Corona virus?
Can we train Corona virus to use statistics and treat people equally?
You know the answer of those rhetorical questions.
Corona virus is more dangerous to the people with underlying health conditions. And we know that Black population are prone to more health issues than White or other races. There are so many reasons but majority of them are primarily economics: not able to buy health insurance and a good portions are due to racial biases against Black population by predominantly White healthcare systems. That tells us that we need to change the fundamentals of the game.
The the name of the game is “empowerment”. We have to empower Black (and minorities) in America (same is true for every minorities in every societies) economically and educationally. With strong education background and having economic power in hand, Black people would be able to influence the American systems of Police, Politics, Healthcare, Eduction, and Economics. Is it easy to do? Hell no! You would have to start with Education Systems in American which is still segregated (systematic societal segregation - not through legal systems as the Civil rights doesn’t allow it). Thats why everyone is talking soothing words and statements that sounds appealing to masses and gain immediate acceptance without much comprehensive planning required. It would be painstakingly slow and time consuming process but it would create the fundamental shifts to the society to change things permanently. Without that fundamental changes, we would talk about the same issues in another decade - in 2030 or even in 2040 unless the world goes upside down.
We can’t do it alone at individual level but at the very least we can change our mindset and be racially enlightened by not doing and saying anything that fuels the racism in America and in any parts of the world where we live in . Let’s try to do whatever we have in our hands to be part of that change while the country and the world as a whole pick that up to change at macro level.
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