Gandhi's Truths in an Age of Fundamentalism and Nationalism by Gandhi’s Truths in an Age of Fundamentalism & Nationalism (2022)

Author:Gandhi’s Truths in an Age of Fundamentalism & Nationalism (2022)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL070000 Religion / Christianity / General, REL032000 Religion / Hinduism / General, REL084000 Religion / Religion, Politics & State
Publisher: Fortress Press

Introduction

During the Covid-19-ridden year of 2020, Derek Chauvin, a white policeman in Minneapolis, Minnesota, murdered George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. As Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck, choking him to death to tortuous degrees, fellow officers helped him restrain Floyd. Bystanders’ videos of the event moved thousands of people to take to the streets in protest despite Covid’s virulence. Violence erupted on US streets, proving once again that police brutality catalyzes violent social protest. Remember New York’s Harlem in 1964, California’s Watts in 1965, Michigan’s Detroit in 1966, and New Jersey’s Newark in 1967? In 1992, Los Angeles erupted once again in the wake of the acquittal of police officers who, with nightsticks, brutally pummeled Rodney King, an unarmed and defenseless Black man. And in 2014, violence erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of a police officer’s killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black youth.

Influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent praxis, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), held that violence, whether in the form of riots or war, spreads chaos and death. For when violence erupts like an infection that has been “sleeping” in the body politic, the contagion imperils property and life. For King, as for Gandhi, nonviolent persons refuse to spread destruction through violent rhetoric and actions. King’s approach to social protest was not, however, the only one. Blacks who called upon a long history of what one may call the “freedom-by-any-means-necessary” approach to struggle rejected King’s Gandhian and Christ-influenced praxis. Typified by persons such as Minister Malcolm X Shabazz and by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which Malcolm X inspired, the call to resist racist oppression by any means necessary is as old as the revolts of enslaved Africans who picked up arms rather than acquiesce in racist oppression in the Americas. Dr. King nonetheless personifies nonviolent protest, and his legacy has been lifted up many times during the recent Covid-19 pandemic because of the ways in which the virus has thrown painful light on the depth and scope of America’s excessive privileging of white people.

When one juxtaposes Covid-19 with the police officer’s killing of Floyd—and when one remembers Breonna Taylor, an innocent woman whom police officers shot to death after barging into her home shortly before Chauvin killed Floyd—one realizes that the pandemic is an apt metaphor for white privilege. It’s not that whites are immune to the virus, of course, but the system highly favors them, which is why their Covid-19 deaths are substantially fewer than Blacks’.1 That is because white privilege, qua white supremacy, is as widespread as the killer virus that has taken a tragic toll on Black bodies. According to one source, “Housing segregation is arguably the root cause of” Blacks’ high susceptibility to Covid-19. Such “disparities, a manifestation of the systemic racism that has plagued Black Americans’ health since the age of slavery . . . can be blamed on what was called ‘redlining’ during the mid-20th century.”2 Redlining confined

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