48. WHY THIS UPRISING IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WAS A MATTER OF WHEN, NOT IF - A Student Questions The Limits of Peaceful Protest
On the 25th of May George Floyd was murdered, in Minneapolis, at the hands of four cold-blooded police officers. This unlawful killing led to thousands of people demanding that Derek Chauvin, Tou Thao, J.A. Kueng and Thomas Lane all face charges for murder just like any other civilian, but when this didn’t happen, and the murder of George Floyd was classified as manslaughter, protests broke out across America, some of which descended into looting, rioting and destruction of millions of dollars' worth of property.
However, these protests should not have been unexpected to us. The murder of George Floyd was only the straw that broke the camel's back. We should’ve known that this uprising was a matter of when not if. In this essay I will present to you two key arguments as to why the protests in America have broken out, the first being that racism towards black people is one of the foundations of the United States we see today. The form of racism I am referring to is the slave trade, which was abolished nearly 100 years after the U.S.A was founded. I will show you how this tragedy, of black people being forced to labour for countless hours only to be treated like animals against their will, has led to generations of white men in America believing they hold power over black people and that black people are inferior as it is written into their own constitution and even though there is no longer physical segregation, this means nothing if mentally the people of power in the U.S.A aren’t prepared to enforce them.
The second argument I will put forward is that peaceful protests simply haven’t worked. We have seen the likes of Martin Luther King Jr be assassinated, we have seen Colin Kaepernick publicly treated as a villain, all for peacefully protesting against the system that treats black people as subhuman. We have seen the media attack these people saying that this isn’t the “right way” to protest and refusing to listen to their message. The minorities of the U.S.A have taken notice to this and now realise they must take their actions further just to get their voice heard, as Malcolm X said, “Nonviolence is good as long as it works” and clearly it hasn’t.
As I pointed out earlier, the reason we are seeing such outrage, and even riots, in the U.S.A today is due to the level of systematic oppression that black people have faced across the world for much of the last millennium. However, even though we have seen a, largely favoured, black president and physical segregation ended, it’s been statistically worse in the U.S. This is because the constitution that the U.S was built on, was made nearly 100 years before the end of the slave trade, a time when black people weren’t seen as people, but instead animals in the eyes of many white people who lived in the U.S at the time. This idea that white people are of a ‘higher class’ compared to those of colour is one that has been passed down throughout generations for 244 years. This has led to a mental segregation in society between the thinking of white supremacists who run the U.S and the black civilians who were forced to build it, leading to a lot of the race fuelled issues and the systematic oppression that we see today; for example in Hollywood, where there is significant underrepresentation of black people; another example is that policemen in Minneapolis are seven times more likely to use excess force against a black man compared to a white man. It is this mentality which leaves the lack of physical segregation redundant, it is this mentality that led to rows of police guarding Derek Chauvin’s house instead of prosecuting him and it is this mentality that has finally caused the black people of the U.S to fight back.
In some sort of attempt to claim that black people don’t face systematic oppression, someone could make the argument that slavery and the ideals that slavery is based upon died in the U.S when the 13thamendment was passed and slavery in the U.S was abolished. Due to how the amendments where created and passed it meant that a majority of congress must’ve agreed with the amendment for it to pass, therefore a majority of the white people in power must’ve seen the way black people were treated and wanted to put it too an end. They could also then link this to the rest of the U.S population and make the claim that racism towards black people wasn’t favoured by the people of the U.S as they voted for Abraham Lincoln to come into power whilst knowing his beliefs surrounding slavery and his plans to abolish it. It is wrong to say that the idea that slavery is based upon, that black people are a lower level of human than white people, still exists as it was actively voted against in 1865.
However, this amendment passed by Abraham Lincoln was passed almost 100 years after the U.S declared independence. In this time the U.S had 15 presidents, none of whom had a congress that was willing to pass an amendment to end the slavery of black people. Therefore, for over a quarter of American history, black people were lawfully treated worse than dogs, showing how this view of white people being a higher class than black people is clearly something which has been embedded in American culture. If the proof that I have laid out in front of you is still not enough to show you that oppression of black people in America is a real issue, then we shall take a closer look at the 13th amendment itself. When we do this, we see that the amendment says “...Slavery, except for punishment as a crime......, shall exist within the United States”. Therefore, as recent popular Netflix documentary 13th has shown, it is still legal to this day to have enslave a black person in the U.S according to the U.S constitution, the very foundation of the U.S.A. The oppression of black people is one of the foundations of the U.S.A. Black people have been trying live as equals in America ever since its independence, however, today in 2020 we cannot say this equality has been achieved despite hundreds of protests across hundreds of years. It was only a matter of when, not if, that these protests would turn into riots.
My second argument I would like to put forward to show you as to why this, occasionally violent, uprising in the U.S is a matter of when, not if, is that peaceful protests have simply not worked. Whenever we have seen a black man start a peaceful protest they have been slandered by the press and have been told that “this is not the right way to protest”. There are two specific times that this exact phenomenon happened that I would like to explain to you in detail, and why these examples have driven the generation of today to go further for change. The first of these surrounds NFL star Colin Kaepernick. In 2016, Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem in the last pre-season game for the San Francisco 49’ers, instead of this he decided to take a symbolic knee and to defend his actions he said “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.” Following this Nike made their next major ad campaign with Kaepernick as the central figure, however, this led to the company's stock price falling by a whole 2% and millions of their products being burnt by thousands of racist customers. In addition to this Kaepernick’s peaceful taking of a knee was not supported by the NFL and NFL greats such as Jerry Rice said that he was “disrespecting the flag” of the US. These examples of hate against a peaceful protest show us that people refuse to listen to the real reason as to why Kaepernick took the knee and that the people in the US who did understand Kaepernick’s reasoning yet disagreed were being openly racist, the first example showing that peaceful protests don’t always work and, historically, haven’t worked on this issue in America.
The second of the examples I would like to bring up to further the historical point is the example of Martin Luther King Jr. Whilst there is not one example I can single out, I am going to show you how the biggest advocate for peace was ultimately ignored and achieved relatively little compared to the size of the issue we are facing in the oppression of black people in the US. In 1963, MLK Jr delivered his first and most famous speech; “I have a dream”. In this speech he said he dreamt that “the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice”. MLK Jr didn’t just dream this for one state, he believed his peaceful protesting would change the whole of the US, which was clear throughout the whole of his speech, if not the world. However, for all the black lives that MLK Jr tried to save, he was met with many criticisms during his lifetime. In his final year of life he had a 75% disapproval rating amongst American citizens and even more telling was that the 36thpresident of the US, Lyndon Johnson, publicly cut ties with Luther King Jr after he spoke out against sending black men to oppress Vietnam alongside their own oppressor. It was clear that Luther King Jr and his actions were disliked, if not hated by very important people in the US, as well as the citizens themselves. Black people have witnessed this happening in their history and have decided that the actions of peaceful protest do not always work; to gain their civil and human rights they must fight until they no longer can.
You may wish to tell me I am wrong. That Martin Luther King Jr and Colin Kaepernick have created change, they have changed the lives of millions of black people in the US and people have listened. In the protests and riots over the last two weeks, we have seen thousands of protestors follow Kaepernick’s lead and take a peaceful knee alongside the police departments which work in their cities. We have seen Martin Luther King Jr stand behind Lyndon Johnson as he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation in public places as well as discrimination, of any form, in employing a person. These examples clearly show that peaceful protests do work sometimes and can be the cause of change in our world. We have seen the US, one of the most inherently racist nations on Earth, end physical segregation and put those who are black on the same playing field as those who are black in the field of employment. There is no need for rioting, and it is something that was uncalled for and not something that was envisaged by the black people of the US.
However, there are issues with this counter to my argument. First of all, there may be those who are following in Kaepernick’s footsteps and taking a knee as we have seen across a range of media platforms, however this is happening alongside riots and the burning of millions of dollars' worth of property. The knee was a foundation to build on, not only do black people feel they need to show their lack of unity with the US, to be heard they realise they need to express it in a way which the rich white elites that run the US will hear, burning down their money. Secondly, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 achieved nothing to put an end to the systematic oppression that black people face every day in the US. Segregation was a consequence of the deep-rooted racism in American culture. To only end segregation was the equivalent of plucking the petals off a flower, to kill the flower you need to pull out the roots and replant them completely, which the Civil Rights Act of 1964 didn’t come close to doing. If racist foundations of the US aren’t destroyed, then there will always be racism and oppression towards black people, racism and oppression which will find a way to show it exists, if not through segregation it will be through the unlawful killing of black people, it will be through the lack of black students at high-end colleges in the US, for example only 6% of students in the class of 2017 at Yale were black, however the percentage of black people in the US is more than double this figure. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did nothing to change the oppression against black people in the US, it only restricted the way it can be delivered.
In conclusion, we all should’ve expected the uprising we are currently witnessing across the US to happen due to the racism and oppression that black people have faced for nearly half a millennium, in a country they were violently forced to become slaves in. It took 16 presidents to introduce an amendment which still legally allows for black people to be enslaved, whilst it took nearly 200 years and thousands of peaceful protests to finally introduce an act which ended segregation and let black people sit at the front of a bus. It has been 244 years since the USA became independent, and every single one of those years, we have seen black people be racially abused and attacked, with no one that will help them but themselves. Peaceful protests alone will not and have not changed anything to stop the oppression of black people in the US. Breonna Taylor was killed for sleeping, because she was black. George Floyd was killed for allegedly using a counterfeit bill, because he was black. Eric Garner was killed for allegedly selling illegal cigarettes, because he was black. Tamir Rice, a twelve-year old, was shot dead for holding a toy gun, because he was black. This list could go on forever, but it proves to us that black people are abused by a system that was built on racism. The only way to change that is to burn it down and start again. This uprising in the United States of America was a matter of IF not when.
Author: Jay Doal, Student at King Edward VI, Aston School.