Sunday, May 31, 2020

Rodney King to George Floyd - How do we turn the page?

I was only three and so don’t remember the 1965 Watts riots, but I certainly remember the 1992 Rodney King riots that erupted after an appallingly unjust verdict that flew in the face of what we had all seen on videotape. And probably a few years before that, young attorney Jonathan Rollins (Blair Underwood) on the TV show L.A. Law made mainstream America aware not only of racial profiling but the daily indignities like being questioned by police for “jogging while Black”. That was thirty years ago. I feel shame and despair for my country that so little has changed after so much time. I had hoped that with a new generation things would be better, but here we are a generation later and the same travesties are still going on. George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery are only the latest fatalities. The ghosts of Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and too many more in a long chain of injustices going back to Rodney King cry out for justice denied. Those in older generations will remember names that go back long before that. It seems that nothing has changed, except that now more of it is caught on film. How do we turn the page?

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