John Pavlovitz: "One Day in Two Americas: The life of Derek Chauvin and the death of Makhia Bryant" [View all]

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Last edited Wed Apr 21, 2021, 11:25 AM - Edit history (1)

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.
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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.
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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.

https://johnpavlovitz.com/2021/04/21/one-day-in-two-americas-the-life-of-dererk-chauvin-and-the-death-of-makhia-bryant/