We saw two Americas in a single day.
As Officer Derek Chauvin’s fate was being decided by a jury in a Minneapolis courtroom, Columbus, Ohio Police were deciding 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant’s in front of her house.
Unlike him, for her there was no careful deliberation, no meticulous processing of information, no measured and sober judgment, no beyond a shadow of a doubt certainty, no prolonged time of waiting—only an immediate death sentence.
Just as the news of Chauvin’s conviction had begun to sweep through our nation, offering Americans of color and their supporters a rare moment of anything resembling personal accountability for the murder of a black man by police, what seemed like an incremental bend of the moral arc of the universe toward justice—police officers in Columbus told us not to get used to that.
It was another breathtaking reminder of what normal is in this country for people like Chauvin and for people like Bryant, lest we forget it for even a second. The former’s penalty is a rarity, the latter’s execution, far more commonplace. There are still two very different Americas at work and we need to reckon with that.
Today the pundits will assemble, the politicians will pontificate, the preachers will sermonize, and a flood of think pieces will careen into our timelines and onto our screens, debating the multitudinous hows and whys of fixing this collective brokenness, but the answer is rather simple:
Officers need to stop killing people of color.
That’s it.
At least, that is the beginning.
This prolific violence isn’t fundamentally about funding or training or a broken system needing repair or a national reckoning white privilege and white supremacy (those things are all certainly true and need to be addressed with ferocity and creativity). But at its core, this is about a collective heart sickness that so dehumanizes black and brown human beings in the eyes of law enforcement, that it allows them to act in haste and with recklessness and without hesitation, because they believe no accountability will come—because it so rarely has.
Two Americas were revealed in their stories.
From the moment he slowly and deliberately murdered George Floyd in the street in May of 2020, Derek Chauvin received every benefit of an America designed to protect people like him: a heavily redacted initial police report, steady political resistance to charges even being filed, fierce legal representation afterward, and a small army of conservative white Americans who repeatedly assassinated Floyd’s character postmortem and tried to make a nation believe a white officer over their own eyes.
In a few minutes yesterday, Ma’Khia Bryant received what young people of color have so often received since America’s inception: total disregard by those charged with protecting her (those she trusted to keep her safe)—and now in the aftermath of their failure, the salivating partisan television hosts and neighborhood bigots, who will engage in the wildest of intellectual gymnastics and desperate story-spin in order to make this radiant, fully alive 16-year-old honor student somehow responsible for her own termination.
Two nations are not sustainable and should not be acceptable for us.
People of color have long known that there have existed two different Americas and they’ve been trying to tell the rest of us. There has been the whitewashed, Stars and Stripes, firework fantasy of songs and anthems and history books; one that has done its best to erase the contributions of black and brown people and the shared sins of those who have built and sustained ourselves at their expense—the mythical nation MAGA nostalgia pines and fights for.
And there is the 244-year reality of a bigotry and brutality that has been largely unabated because those who have wielded power have made sure of it, the violence that hasn’t been documented in HD video and shoved in front of us, demanding that we not look away, the place where justice has so rarely visited.
The reality of two Americas isn’t in question anymore for those of us willing to pay attention.
The only question for people of faith, morality, and conscience here now is, which America we will feed and which one we will starve to death—with our time and our words and our work and our resources and our votes.
I want to contribute to making a nation where murderous, racist cops are terrified and buoyant young black girls are empowered, because the reverse isn’t something worthy of my time and it isn’t worthy of Ma’Khia Bryant or Daunte Wright or George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or…
Two Americas, especially ones this divergent, are simply one too many.
Choose the nation you want to live in, and make it.
