A chorus of voices

I am not the person who should be pretending to expertise on the murder of George Floyd. Let's begin there this morning.

I am not the person who should be pretending to expertise on the murder of George Floyd, because I am a white 65-year-old male who grew up in an almost exclusively white neighborhood and went to an overwhelmingly white school system. And so what happened to George Floyd and Christian Cooper and Ahmaud Arbery and Philando Castile and all the many, many others is never going to happen to me.

I am never going to be executed by vigilantes while jogging.

I am never going to have the cops called on me while birdwatching.

I never had to have The Talk with my father, never had to be careful what toy I picked up to avoid getting shot in Walmart, never had to worry about being choked to death in police custody for kiting a check or selling cigarettes on a street corner.

All of that is completely outside my realm of experience. Inside my realm of experience, however, is the knowledge that, as a white man, I can stage an armed occupation of my statehouse and not have to worry about law enforcement doing any of the aforementioned. Hell, they'll hold the door for me.

What a lucky boy am I.

As such, I can watch Minneapolis burn and only pretend I understand it is the boiling over of years of rage at the countless slings and arrows of outrageous indifference. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, riots do not happen in a vacuum. They are a by-product.

And so I can get that rage. But I can't get that rage, if you know what I mean.

What I can do is what Carson Wentz and Zach Ertz have done.

They spoke out, as white Americans and white professional athletes. And that is important, because the murder of George Floyd cannot just be an African-American issue. It needs to be an American issue -- especially in an America whose current president's words and deeds, past and present, have led racists and white supremacists to regard him as a fellow traveler.

And so more than just Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James and other principled men and women  of color need to kneel, figuratively and otherwise. We all need to.

One segment of America should not have to carry this tune alone. The entire chorus should.

"Can't even fathom what the black community has to endure on a daily basis,"  Wentz wrote on social media. "Being from North Dakota, I've spent a large part of my life surrounded by people of similar color, so I'm never gonna act like I know what the black community goes through or even has gone through already. I'll never know the feeling of having to worry about my kids going outside because of their skin color."

Ertz and his wife, Julie Johnston Ertz, a member of the U.S. women's national soccer team, chimed in with this: "Even the thought of trying to come up with the 'perfect' saying is so damn selfish. What I do know is I am so unbelievably sorry. I am sorry for the pain and hurt the African-American community has endured by another human, and more than anything I am sorry that you feel you are alone in this situation."

And, yeah, sure, those are just pretty words. And words are just words. But you've gotta start someplace.

The key, this time, is not stopping there.