The Verdict Is In

 The trial for Derek Chauvin, the police officer charged with killing George Floyd, is over. The verdict is in. And the verdict was guilty. But is that the verdict referred to in the title of this article?

In reality, the verdict both has been in for a long time and is in everyday that an unarmed person of color is killed by the police. It is the verdict that keeps repeating itself with the same finding. Only this verdict doesn't pronounce a judgment on any one individual, it pronounces a judgment on our whole nation, on all of us. And I imagine that other nations have guilty verdicts constantly hovering over them too.

Considering the history of our nation, the continual police killings of unarmed Blacks might lead us to the conclusion that some parts of Jim Crow never ended. Here, we should note that Jim Crow lasted roughly 90 years. In that time period, around 3,959 Blacks were hung (click here). That works out to an average, perhaps on the high end, of 44 per year.

Now compare that with today as it applies to police killings of unarmed people of color such as Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans. How close to 44 per year do those statistics have to come before we admit that the problem continues? Not knowing the actual statistics, suppose that more Blacks were killed by Blacks than killed by racists during most of the Jim Crow years, would that imply that Jim Crow did not exist?

Deniers who refuse to believe that we still have systemic racism in our nation will correctly tell us that today, far more Blacks are killed by Blacks than by the police. But a similar statistic applies to Whites killed by Whites as well. And the difference in percent between the two statistics is 8%. These same deniers will claim that more homicides are committed by Blacks than whites. But homicide is not the only violent crime in America. When one checks the statistics, one finds that Whites commit more violent crimes than Blacks.

In addition, those same deniers only look at race when quoting their statistics. They fail to look at the economic class and type of community violators belong to. These deniers seem to support racial profiling as practiced by some police officers. What they seem unexposed to is that a 2006 FBI Bulletin warned us about the White Supremacists becoming police officers (click here for reference). A PBS article, citing an Los Angeles Times article gave more specific information about that regarding Los Angeles, Illinois, Texas, and Ohio (click here for reference). We should also note that killings are not the only way in which racial bias and even violence is exercised against people of color.

Some deniers of systemic racism in our nation are idealists. They prefer to think of themselves and our nation as having changed since the Civil Rights Movement. They want to be color-blind people as one of their heroes, Martin Luther King Jr., was. But is their version of color-blindness the same that possessed King? After all, did King believe that mentioning the races of a police officer involved and that of unarmed victims of police violence invokes racism?

I remember reading a book by James Cone, a renowned theologian, that was, in part, about what it was like to grow up during Jim Crow. He wrote about how he and his family worried each time that his father came home late from work. They worried about whether his father was a victim of the race-based violence that was part of Jim Crow. Are too many things the same today as they were back then? The answer to that question helps determine the verdict on whether our nation still harbors systemic racism.