We Have Overcome by Jason D. Hill

Author:Jason D. Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2018-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

Racial Profiling,

Police Brutality, and the Moral Hypocrisy of

“Black Lives Matter”

So, I’m chatting with a colleague of mine from a university in New York who is a retired college professor and who is now teaching in the prisons. We’re having lunch and he’s talking despairingly about hopelessness in America. I stare blankly at him and chew on my salmon salad. He asks me what I think. I tell him to be more specific. He’s shocked. Don’t I just see the entire hopelessness of American society all around me? Allan is sixty-eight years old, a self-committed Marxist. Both of his parents were surgeons from New York, and he attended private schools all his life. He graduated from Harvard and Princeton Universities with a plethora of degrees in philosophy and French literature. Although we’re on opposite ends of the political spectrum, I still enjoy the sharpness of his mind and his compassionate spirit; but I resist, as best as I can, his dour pessimism and lugubrious sentimentality. He’s got a world-weary, seen-it-all attitude. The world, according to his prognostications, is going to be felled soon by one apocalyptic, working-class, universal revolutionary blow. People are hungry in America, he says—literally! They want a change. “Socialism is the way forward,” he says in a dreamy, wistful voice. He advocates an America without borders where even illegal immigrants can vote socialism into a living reality. That’s the only way it will happen, he says. Empower undocumented peoples and even legal immigrants with a sense of their human rights and they’ll transform America into a socialist state. People are hungry, he reasserts.

“They are hungrier in Africa and Haiti, and they are coming in droves to try to escape that form of hunger for a life in America. Maybe we should analytically distinguish between degrees of hunger,” I quip.

He shakes his head.

“Jason, black men are being killed in this country.”

“Oh, I know that. They are being exterminated. We both live in Chicago, where they are being massacred on a weekly and daily basis, but who is killing them? Huh? Are white cops going in and slaughtering them? Are white people from the suburbs rifling them down? Are the military going in and killing these black men?”

“If the cops kill them, what incentive do they have to obey the law and…?”

I cut him off right there, as I know where he’s going with all this. We’ve been here before.

“Listen,” I tell him. “The spate of killings of unarmed black men by police officers in recent years is tragic and a disgrace. It is, I believe, the work of a small minority of rogue police officers, or ordinary officers weighed down by a form of statistical reasoning—given the disproportionate homicidal rates among black men—that breeds a pervasive fear among the general population of blacks, and whites of black men in general. This is sad, and it is a blight against the humanity of all persons.”

I continue, “However, against the heroic commitment of the entire police force in this country, and

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