Why Now?

Black people have faced suppression in this country since the first African slaves were brought to America in the 17th century.

The Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case.

Since then there’ve been over a dozen high profile police brutality cases that have been difficult to miss in the mainstream media.

It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that white privilege exists on a macro level in profound and unacceptable ways in this country.

So why now?

Sure, George Floyd’s death was bit more heinous than the deaths of Freddie Gray, Sam Dubose, Philando Castile, Terence Crutcher, Alton Sterling, Jamar Clark, Jeremy McDole, William Chapman II, Walter Scott, Eric Harris, Tamar Rice, Akai Gurley, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner.

…but can that alone be why half of white America suddenly stood up and declared themselves a civil rights activist three weeks ago?

I don’t think so.

I believe that this overnight shift in civil rights support comes down to the same three things that all else comes down to…identity, community, and purpose- what I have come to call the pillars of meaning.

Over the past three months, the COVID pandemic has deepened our deprivation of all three.

An unimaginable number of Americans have suddenly found themselves unemployed and robbed of their primary purpose in life.

We’ve all been forced to socially distance, in turn losing the face-to-face interactions of a true community.

With a diminished ability to engage in unique activities and express our individuality in public, we’ve experienced an unfamiliar threat to our identities.

This abrupt shift in the American racial climate has been nothing more than the white public’s desire to regain these pillars of meaning at this particular moment in time.

One can now express their identity by simply writing “BLM” (or “ALM”) on Instagram.

One can now find purpose through their fight for a cause larger than themselves.

One has now been given permission by the left to completely ignore the government’s social distancing guidelines and congregate in person if they are doing support for this cause.

There are clearly huge racial inequality issues in this country, the depth of which not I (nor many people reading this) will ever truly understand.

These issues need to be addressed and any movement forward on them is certainly a good thing.

But if you’re a white person who “woke up” one morning three weeks ago and suddenly became a civil rights activist by posting a black photo on Instagram or attending a protest in your city, please recognize that you may have done these things at their most fundamental level in a self-serving way. Or perhaps you just felt that nonconformity would unavoidably label you a racist.

These simple actions alone do not make up for a life of conscious (or more likely unconscious) racism.

Moreover, our collective decision to wait for this particular moment is likely to leave us with nothing more than sabotaged cities, a spike in COVID cases, and general deterioration of our civil society.

We each have a responsibility to continuously examine ourselves and our relationship to the world around us. We shouldn’t wait for self indulgent moments or social media phenomena to change the way we act or voice our opinions to others.

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Photo: Taken in Leipzig, Germany