Meditations on a Black Moment in American History
We’re nearing 140,000 dead from COVID-19 (disproportionately black and brown), another 550 killed by police (disproportionately black and…
We’re nearing 140,000 dead from COVID-19 (disproportionately black and brown), another 550 killed by police (disproportionately black and brown) in the first six months of the year, tens of millions (disproportionately black and brown) out of work, millions (disproportionately black and brown) on the precipice of eviction and homelessness.
On the Fourth of July, I posted this flag in black and white, along with the poem “To America” by James Weldon Johnson:
How would you have us, as we are?
Or sinking ‘neath the load we bear?
Our eyes fixed forward on a star?
Or gazing empty at despair?
Rising or falling? Men or things?
With dragging pace or footsteps fleet?
Strong, willing sinews in your wings?
Or tightening chains about your feet?
(And then:)
A flag in reverse. In black and white. A poem. An address. An unanswered question posed a century ago. Answered, perhaps, with the bodies of dead black men sacrificed on the alter of white power. Lynched. Imprisoned. Crowded into slums through the use of state and corporate power and then blamed for the poverty we have imposed upon them.
Dying at the hands of police. Dying from the coronavirus. Facing eviction and homelessness. This is America 2020. America at a time of plague.
A flag in reverse on Independence Day. A flag in black and white on a day when we proclaim our patriotism, our love of country, our unthinking and inerrant claims of superiority. I’m getting old. I cannot shake this pessimism. Today, another police killing. In Phoenix. On the Fourth of July.
Jay Garcia, 28, sitting in a parked car. In a friend’s driveway. Unarmed, say some. Say witnesses. Armed, say police. “The investigation into this shooting is still in the early stages,” says the police spokewoman.
An investigation. A funeral. Another death. Enough is enough. “It does not shock us that despite all the scrutiny from community Phoenix PD continues to respond violently to calls,” says a councilman.
This is America. Sinking ‘neath the load we bear. This is America. Gazing empty at despair. This is America. “Watch me move / This a celly / That’s a tool.”
A flag in reverse. Dark times. My pessimism is winning out. I’m told we need unity. That we must defend our heritage, Trump says. A “rich heritage,” he calls it, that “belongs to every citizen.” Every white citizen. That’s the subtext. The knowing wink.
“All Americans living today are the heirs of this magnificent legacy,” proclaims the president. American heroes “etched on … monuments and memorials.” George Floyd is not on a monument. Nor is Eric Garner. There is no memorial to Philando Castile. None for Breonna Taylor. Sandra Bland. Walter Scott. Amadou Dinallo. Eleanor Bumpurs.
“How would you have us?” Johnson asks. The Negro, in the language of the time. The free Black American that was not so free. Victim of American repression in the Jim Crow South, of Northern disinterest, of redlining and separation and violence. Hope giving way to desperation. Never to be in his lifetime “fixed forward on a star,” or to be the “Strong, willing sinews” in the nation’s wings.
“We are American,” Trump proclaims. “No matter our race, color, religion, or creed, we are one America, and we put America first,” and I can’t help but hear echoes. Of Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze. Of Henry Ford. Of Charles Lindbergh. Horatio Seymour. Theodore Bilbo. Lester Maddox. George Wallace.
“You slander generations of heroes who gave their lives for America,” Trump proclaims. Confederate heroes. Defenders of the slave states. “People much braver and much more principled than you.”
The left is engaged in historical revisionism, he says. The left slanders men who died while fighting for freedom. This is Trump’s frame. That the secessionist South, the white South, the slave South, the men who kidnapped men and women and children from Africa, beat them, savaged them, sold them, they “perished fighting for freedom in the Civil War.” These were men of “great legacy,” he says, and we, the left, slander “their memory by insisting that they fought for racism and they fought for oppression.”
This is what unity means to Trump. This is what heritage means. What the defense of statues of slave owners and slavery’s defenders mean. This is America in the age of Trump. America in a time of COVID. A time of plagues.