Once again, protests have come to America
America is infected by two major viruses: the COVID-19 and the 1619 Racism Virus that started when Europeans kidnapped 20 Africans.
Just like a virus, racism has no cure, it replicates, and it mutates over time. The 1960’s Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter movements protest against the same thing; the 1619 Racism Virus!
The only difference is that George Floyd’s murder was a modern-day lynching captured on video. Blacks are no longer lynched by rope, but by knees to the neck. The murderous policeman had the same cold, steely eyes as the White people who watched Black men hang from trees.
Why a knee to the neck for more than eight minutes? Because the cop thought he could get away with it! The world saw the eyes of a murderer with no respect for life.
Recent police murders have pricked the conscious of “White Silence”. Unlike the 1960s, protesters of all races, cultures, and generations are marching to protest racial injustice. These murders ripped the scab from a sore, exposing racism as a wound that never healed.
Slavery was the foundation of American capitalism and was a system of forced free labor, torture, and murder. Through European exploration, slave trade, plantation economies, and the triangular trade with Europe, the rise of capitalism was fueled by the socioeconomic racism virus.
The trauma of police murders has caused a tectonic shift toward justice. In plain view, these murders crystallize the centuries-old conflict between the ideals of justice and the denial of equal justice for Blacks.
The 1619 Virus is systemic, and it is the foundation upon which America was built. At the Federal Convention in 1787, slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person in determining how many representatives a colony had. The Virus is also in the Constitution as part of the legal system. The noble inalienable rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness did not apply to enslaved or free Africans. They only applied to White men.
The 1619 Virus mutated—through slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the infestation of legal drugs in the Black community. And now, it has mutated again in the form of draconian laws, mass incarceration, and the rise of the prison industry as a stock market investment.
Because the 1619 Virus was never treated, it continues to infect America; mutating in form, but constant in its oppression.
Worldwide protests give hope that the racist mind can transformed to appreciate all humanity. Although there’s no cure, we can treat the virus with education about America’s true history.
Reconciliation will only occur when America looks itself in the mirror and acknowledges the horrors of the past. Like Africans did when released from slavery in 1865, Whites too must seek education.
Redistribution of wealth is a major element of a cure. It’s time for America to pay reparations for the debt owed for the wealth accrued from centuries of free labor.
Attorney Fred H. Flowers is co-founder of the Florida State University Civil Rights Institute and Civil Rights Advocate. He can be reached by email at fflow@flowerslawllc.com
