Like most of us, I watched the video of George Floyd’s death with increasing horror as it went on. But I can honestly say I wasn’t shocked. I was outraged, for sure. But I wasn’t shocked. Black people are simply treated differently in our country than white people are. And they have been for hundreds of years.

To ignore that, to act like it isn’t both historical and present fact, to believe that black people live in the same United States of America that I live in, is intentional ignorance. In order to believe that, I would have to ignore the history of our country, including events that have taken place in the last 30 years—both events that have been widely publicized and events that never receive publicity because they happen every day in numbers too great to fathom.

breathing and language

What stood out to me in the George Floyd video was his repeated, panicked insistence, “I can’t breathe.” Of course, it reminded me of Eric Garner’s similar pleading refrain as he was violently detained. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I found myself taking deep breaths.

Breathing is such a part of what it means to be human, to be alive, that in some languages the words for “breath” and “life” are often exactly the same. In Ancient Greek, pneuma can be interpreted as breath, life, spirit, and vitality. In Latin, spiro can be interpreted as a verb that means “to breathe” and “to be alive.” In Sanskrit (and Hindi), the noun meaning “breath”, (prāṇa), also carries the meaning of life, spirit, and soul. In Classical Chinese, the character 氣 takes a variety of meaning including both breath and life, especially in a philosophical context. In Hebrew, a similar word is rúach. This one shows up in the Bible in Genesis 2:7 in the form of the phrase “breath of life” in describing how God breathed into the man that He had made … and the man became a living being.

For those of us who are followers of Jesus, the Greek word pneuma is used throughout the early church writings as the word that is most often translated as the Spirit of God. If you think of “Spirit” being the same thing as the “Wind of God” or the  “Breath of God,” it actually brings a new depth of meaning to some very famous passages in the writings of the Apostle Paul to the early church.

“If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.”

Romans 8:11 (ESV) [emphasis added]

(If interested, you can also check out Ephesians 3:14-19, Galatians 6, and 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, to name a few.)

There is something about breath, about breathing, that makes it the consistent picture the earliest followers of Jesus used to try to explain what it means to have God living inside of you, giving you strength, animating your new life with Him.

Even if you’re not a follower of Jesus, breath and breathing have been at the core of what it means to be human for thousands of years. Even before human beings understood the mechanics of breathing from a scientific perspective, there was something almost mystical about this process of breathing in and breathing out … and the invisible nature of how that keeps each of us alive.

Breath is sacred. It is one of the fundamental things that makes us human.

we’ve inherited white privilege

(I got this idea from Dianne Malone.)

The truth we need to confront as white people in America is that we have been (both knowingly and unknowingly) colluding with a system that makes things easier for us and much more difficult for people of color, specifically black people. It’s part of our inheritance.

An inheritance is something that is handed down to you from the past, from your ancestors. We normally think of it in terms of money—money that we didn’t make, but we benefit from it. Whether or not you’ve inherited any money directly from your ancestors, you’ve inherited your skin color and a pattern of belief, behavior, and organizational systems designed to make life better for those of us with white skin. And to make things more difficult on those with black skin.

You may not like it. You may feel like you’re nice to black people … you even have some black friends … you shouldn’t be held responsible for something you didn’t do that happened in the past. But that’s not how an inheritance works. If it were money you were inheriting, you wouldn’t give it back and say, “That’s not mine! I didn’t do anything to earn that!” You would cash the check and go on a shopping spree.

Our inheritance of white privilege and white-biased systems of power is probably something you would rather ignore. That doesn’t mean it’s not real.

Speaking generally, although everyone in the United States has choices and options, white people have more. Employers generally prefer people with white-sounding names and move more ethnic names to the bottom of the pile. Google “ethnic bias in hiring” and spend a few hours reading about it if you don’t believe me. The U.S. has gotten better in the last few decades compared to some countries, but we’ve got a long way to go. 

(Yes, there are variations of this. Yes, there are some communities, especially of predominantly low-income, where people of all races suffer similar challenges of limited choices for advancement. However, over the last 150 years since black people were freed from slavery, white people have had more and better options for what their life would be like. Are there specific, anecdotal examples where this is NOT true? Yes. Is it true in general? Yes.)

I was never stopped by a cop while on a date with my soon-to-be-wife and had the policeman ask my girlfriend, “Is everything OK here?” But I know a non-white male who had exactly that happen to him. Not 100 years ago. About 5 years ago. In a suburb of Denver. Simply because he was NOT white … and his girlfriend WAS. 

If you know a black person in America, every single one has a multitude of stories like that … and much worse. The reason the death of George Floyd has caused such an uproar is NOT just that he was killed by a white cop. It’s that the image of a white man with his knee on the neck of a black man repeatedly saying, “I can’t breathe,” is the perfect image to describe what it means to be black in America.

Obviously, I’m not speaking from experience. I’m sharing what I’ve learned. I’ve chosen to listen to black voices and give value and credence to what they share—even when I don’t agree and the things they say make me uncomfortable. I’m ashamed to say that there have been times where I’ve minimized and dismissed the kinds of stories I told above. But I’ve learned that I was wrong. I needed to listen. I needed to change my understanding of reality based on valuing and believing someone else’s experience.

statistics about police brutality & the black community

I’ve spent hours this week researching and reading article after article about police brutality, especially in the last 15-20 years. I hope we can all agree that up to and including the Civil Rights Movement, police brutality toward people in black communities was rampant. We’ve all seen the video clips of water hosing and beating (and worse!) that happened in the 1960s and before. But we’ve moved beyond that, haven’t we? Especially in the last 20 years … for crying out loud, we had a black President. Doesn’t that show that the oppression of black people is over in America?

Absolutely not. At this point, I want to IMPLORE you to watch a documentary on Netflix called, “13th.” It talks about the 13th amendment to the Constitution, which made slavery illegal and the effects of that amendment (and the sneaky clause that was included in it). The documentary talks about the mass incarceration of blacks that has taken place since 1970 and how BOTH MAJOR POLITICAL PARTIES have put policies and institutions in place that have seriously damaged communities of color, specifically black communities. 

Please watch “13th” with an open mind to evaluate what is presented. I believe it should be required viewing for every white person in America. Yes, it includes words that are uncomfortable to hear. It includes images that are uncomfortable to see. But if we really want to understand who we are as a nation and how we’ve arrived at this moment, we have to listen. We have to open our eyes to what we have done as a nation. That’s where change has to begin.

Here is one of my favorite quotes from “13th,” somewhat because of who said it.

“The objective reality is that virtually no one who is white understands the challenge of being black in America.” – NEWT GINGRICH

That’s a prominent Republican who served in the House of Representatives from 1978-1999, including serving as the Speaker of the House from 1995-1999. This is not a “liberal Democrat” who wants to “take away guns” and “give everyone a blank welfare check.” He’s acknowledging the truth. White people don’t understand what it’s like to be black.

The shocking thing I discovered in my research is that we don’t have good statistics on police brutality, specifically killings by police. There are articles that argue strongly for BOTH SIDES of this issue (one extreme saying “police indiscriminately kill black people all the time due to widespread racial bias” and the other extreme saying “police targeting black people is a complete falsehood propagated by liberals and the media”) acknowledge that we don’t have good information to base EITHER of those statements on.

Why? Because police departments don’t want to share information about it. Up until 2003, the FBI and the CDC both attempted to keep track of killings by police officers. The FBI communicated directly with police departments and governments around the country and the CDC looked at death certificates. The FBI got minimal data from police departments (with some not responding at all) and the CDC knew that the official causes of death were probably not recorded on the death certificates because the police were influencing what was recorded. The CDC knew it was happening. So what did they do? 

They gave up. 

That’s right. From sometime in 2003 to sometime in 2015 (after the Ferguson riots), the U.S. government was not tracking the number of people killed by police officers in this country. They said it was too hard … and they knew that the data they had was unreliable.

Since 2015, there has been a much more concerted effort, with several laws passed requiring police departments to provide these statistics. But they’re just not doing it.

Organizations like Mapping Police Violence piece together data from multiple sources, including scouring the internet (both news and social media) looking for information. By their own admission, they say their data is the best that’s available … but they’re hoping that just by what they are doing, police departments will feel compelled to greater levels of transparency.

This is why I haven’t talked in detail about police killings and overall police brutality toward blacks or people of color. We simply don’t have data. (I also haven’t talked about it because the real issue, the underlying issue, is not just about police officers. As we all know, many of them are fantastic and I don’t want to dilute this conversation by making it about the police. It’s not about them. It’s about me. It’s about you.) We have the stories that all of us have seen on the national news. But we don’t have good, broad data.

It’s almost like we don’t want to know the true extent of what’s going on.

what about the crime rate among blacks? what about black-on-black crime? 

As for the crime rate discussion, I’ll refer you to “13th” again. Without going into details, I’ll just say that there is overwhelming evidence that beginning with President Nixon, many presidential administrations (including Democrat President Clinton), put laws and policies in place that destroyed black communities. Sometimes purposefully.

Here’s a quote from John Ehrlichman, an advisor to President Nixon (as one example).

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

[emphasis added]

President Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill continued and increased federal government spending to increase police forces and build new prisons. This, in concert with the 3 Strikes and You’re Out policy, the establishment of many new Mandatory Minimums (which required judges to give mandatory sentences for certain offenses, mostly drug related), and the Truth in Sentencing law (which required people to serve at least 85% of their sentences before parole/probation) EXPLODED the prison population in our country, with black communities and other communities of color being impacted the most.

Do we really think that black men are SO much more predisposed to violence as to justify their massive over-representation in the U.S. prison population and justice system? Or could something else be going on? Could they be trapped in a system that causes them to act out in violent ways?

(I’m not saying that violent crime is OK if someone has had a difficult life. I’m talking about trends and patterns in our culture and the potential meaning behind them. If we want to address wide-sweeping issues, we have to examine and understand them correctly. My assertion is that black people, specifically black men, have been “placed under the boot” of a predominately white system, resulting in an increase of violent crime in the black community.)

This even includes black-on-black crime. In both “13th” and in several articles I’ve read, black leaders lament the fact that the narrative that black men are worth less (or worthless), are predisposed to violence, and have no options for bettering themselves is believed in the black community just as much (if not more) than in white communities. They have come to believe—their experience has confirmed it—that there is nothing they can do to get out of the culture they are trapped inside of … and that it is black people themselves who are to blame for that. So they kill each other. One of the most horrific parts of this entire situation is that white people have succeeded in removing hope from black communities to this extent.

taking a breath

Breathing is not only about inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide. It’s also required for speaking. The larynx, or voice box, is located above the windpipe, so that pushing the air from the lungs through the voice box and converting it to sound is required for anyone to speak.

I believe that the protests we’ve seen in Minneapolis due to George Floyd (and other protests across the country fueled by his killing and the death of other black Americans in the last 30 years and preceding) are the attempts of the black community to find a voice. To find some way to get our attention. 

“A riot is the language of the unheard.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

(I’m not condoning violence or rioting or looting. I’m making a statement about what I believe to be the underlying cause of the violence.)

So the protests continue. What form of protest would you prefer? A non-violent protest? One that doesn’t risk more lives or require the National Guard to come in to “calm things down?”

Maybe well-known sports figures from the black community could, I don’t know, kneel during the National Anthem as a way to remind us that freedom doesn’t look the same for everyone who lives in our country. But that won’t work either. We’ll tell him to stand up, that he’s disrespecting America (and veterans, somehow) and that he should be grateful that he lives in a country where he can get rich because he runs fast and throws a football. 

(Never mind the fact that when white people stage armed protests against stay-at-home orders, they are celebrated for standing up for their rights and urged on by our President. But an unarmed, non-violent protest brings such ridicule that a black man can no longer earn a living because of it.) 

What form of protest would we prefer?

No one is listening. No one can hear them. It’s as if every black voice in America is saying, “I can’t breathe,” in a panicked, frantic, struggling voice. While the knee of our white privilege is on their necks.

When you’re healthy and not exercising or something, you don’t think about breathing. It’s involuntary. You just breathe and go about your day. But when you can’t catch your breath, when your lungs aren’t working right, or when someone’s knee is on your neck, ALL you think about is your breathing. And trying to gasp for just a tiny bit of oxygen.

It’s the same with white privilege. For those of us who have it, we never think about it. We just go about our day. For those who don’t have it, everything is more difficult. Everything is more of a struggle. Straining to grab a shallow breath, longing to gain the oxygen to be heard. 

As the ones with the privilege, we have a responsibility to use it for those who have been on the underside of power since they were brought to these shores against their will. 

We must use what we’ve been given to bring hope and healing to those who need it most. We must stand up for those who have been shoved to the ground.

Those of us who breathe freely have a responsibility to speak up for those who are struggling to catch their breath.

perspective from black voices

Dianne Malone: For the Black People Still Breathing
https://diannemalone.com/author/2020/05/28/for-the-black-people-still-breathing/

Manny Scott: What in the World is Going On in Minnesota?
https://mannyscott.com/blog/what-in-the-world-is-going-on-in-minnesota

things you can do

https://medium.com/equality-includes-you/what-white-people-can-do-for-racial-justice-f2d18b0e0234

https://sojo.net/articles/our-white-friends-desiring-be-allies

things i read or referenced

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Police-Brutality-in-the-United-States-2064580/Antibrutality-campaigns

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/after-ferguson-black-men-and-boys-still-face-the-highest-risk-of-being-killed-by-police

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2019-08-15/police-shootings-are-a-leading-cause-of-death-for-black-men

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2020/02/police-violence-racial-bias-shootings-by-race-research-data/605866/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/08/police-shootings-media-created-fake-crisis/

https://www.brightworkresearch.com/criticalthinking/2019/11/why-the-claims-by-black-lives-matter-on-police-shootings-are-false/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/18/police-killings-government-data-count

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/08/how-many-police-shootings-a-year-no-one-knows/

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/07/data-police-racial-bias

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/fryer_police_aer.pdf

https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2019/the-truth-behind-racial-disparities-in-fatal-police-shootings/