Our charge to destroy systemic racial inequality

Chuck Hobbs

They have been called many things through the millennia — names like skeptics, cynics, or Pharisees. Names, that while pejorative, spoke to and still apply to those who doubt the testimony of the oppressed or the righteous demands of those wishing to liberate the oppressed. 

Those of such appellations often fell upon the wrong side of history, as they were more comfortable with false “order” than with liberty and justice. They were the ones who could see the inequities in the Greek city-states and later in the Roman Republic and Empire; never wrestling at length with the idea that aristocratic and patrician lucre was dependent upon the misery of the enslaved and lower classes who adhered to their established order. They were the ones who knew that the Roman occupation of Judea was oppressive, but were uncomfortable with revolting against the social order by violence — or by love (Jesus Christ).

In the modern era, they were the ones who may have known that the institution of slavery was inherently unjust, but their fealty to “property rights” ‘trumped’ even the slightest concerns about the miseries of the enslaved. Their immediate descendants held similar views during Jim Crow, knowing that the lynching of Black people was an inherent evil and that the usurpation of Black rights to the franchise, to live where they wish — or marry as their hearts desired — was wrong, but they remained silent about those unjust laws that rendered Blacks second class citizens. Second class citizens, I remind, in a land in which Blacks paid taxes and fought and died for from the Spanish American War through World War II in segregated units.

Yes, from time immemorial, the skeptics, cynics, and Pharisees have known that injustice is wrong, but they did not care enough to foment change. Dr. Martin Luther King noted in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” that their words of “wait” almost always meant “never.” Indeed, King and other peaceful civil rights leaders prayed fervently and marched peacefully across the South and Chicago only to be beaten, spat upon, and hosed down with high powered water dispensers. It is easy to conclude that those who committed such violence against peaceful protesters were evil, but the more difficult conclusion for some–but not this writer–is in noting that those who saw such acts occur but said nothing and did nothing were evil, too.

The same holds true today; I cannot nor will I abide by calls from some to “seek to understand” folks who promulgate evil — or are comfortable with evil. Just as light casts out darkness, the push for righteousness this day must begin with the acknowledgment that police excessive use of force against Black people is inherently evil and must stop post-haste. This is not a “both sides” moment; the police are here to protect and serve, not harass and kill, and the harassment and killing of Black people by police public servants is a vestige of Jim Crow that must be rooted out. 

When the modern skeptics question the testimony of Black victims, when the modern cynics doubt the prevalence of police brutality among Black people unless there is a clear-cut videotape like in George Floyd’s and Ahmaud Arbery’s cases, and when the modern Pharisees point out their problems with protesters blocking roads or try to lump peaceful protesters with rioters who have an agenda, such Pharisees show that they could not care less about the heart of the matter, which is that Black lives matter — and that police brutality is an inherent evil!

So I reject the modern skeptics, cynics, and Pharisees and I pray that they open their closed eyes and have a change within their hardened and inherently racist hearts.

Chuck Hobbs is a trial lawyer and an award winning freelance writer. Follow him on Twitter @RealChuckHobbs