Ran across a quote the other day, thanks to a post by Deadspin contributor Chuck Modiano. It's seems especially relevant in a week in which America again revealed itself to be a violent and blood-soaked nuthouse, gripped by gun mania and awash in psychopaths and street cops who've forgotten they are first and foremost supposed to be peace officers.
It was a week when video emerged of a 13-year-old black kid getting shot to death with his hands in the air by yet another patrolman who fired first and asked questions later.
It was a week in which there was more unrest in the streets of Minneapolis after a 26-year veteran cop (a training officer, for pity's sake) somehow forgot which hip her Taser was on and shot a black motorist to death during a routine traffic stop -- a stop that never should have been made, and that certainly didn't call for her to unholster either the Taser or her service piece.
It was a week in which a 19-year-old punk allegedly took an AR-15 into a FedEx office out by the airport in Indianapolis, and shot eight people to death before shooting himself.
We are a nation, here in 2021, that loves guns too much and human beings not enough. We are a nation whose sick fascination with the former has made police officers trigger happy, because we insist on arming ourselves with military-grade weaponry and a fistful of concealed carry permits.
This is the nation we are. This is, frankly, the nation we deserve to be, because you always get the nation you deserve in a democracy.
Know who would have hated all that more than anyone, and wouldn't have kept quiet about it?
The man who uttered this quote, reprinted in Modiano's piece:
I think most white Americans have their heads in the sand when it comes to race relations. White America is saying "law and order." But in their hearts, law and order simply means holding black men down.
The man who said that was Jackie Robinson, whose breaking of the color line in major league baseball on April 15, 1947 was commemorated again this week.
t's a quote from decades ago that appears in a 2016 Ken Burns documentary, and it rings just as true today.
It tells us that, were Robinson alive today, he might well have been in the streets in Minneapolis the other night, too. Or at least been outspoken in his sympathy for those who were.
The mythology, the one white America so loves, is that he was this proud stoic man who endured all manner of indignities with dignity in the summer of 1947. The reality is he was only that stoic man until he didn't need to be anymore. Thereafter, he said what he thought -- and Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and the rest of the reactionary hacks on Fox News would have turned his name into an epithet as a result.
Stick to sports, they likely would have said. Because that's the country in which we live these days.
God help us all.
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