America's Long Overdue Awakening to Systemic Racism

Just before 7 p.m. on June 1, a deployment of local, state and federal forces, armored head to toe in riot gear, unleashed rubber bullets and sprayed tear gas onto a crowd of peaceful demonstrators gathered in the park to protest under the mantra “Black Lives Matter.” Since then, the debate over systemic racism has spread across the nation and around the world.

Trump’s Administration has repeatedly denied that discrimination against black Americans is embedded in the political, economic, and social structure of the country. Trump believes there are “injustices in society,” but the notion that antiblackness is intrinsic to U.S. law enforcement has been declared untrue. Attorney General William Barr warned against “automatically assuming that the actions of an individual necessarily mean that their organization is rotten.”

But, for all that’s good about America, something is rotten. The protesters in Lafayette Park on June 1 may have been galvanized by the disturbing video of the murder of George Floyd, suffocated to death beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. But at the core of their movement is much more than the outrage over the latest instances of police brutality.

Centuries of racist policy have left black Americans in the dust. The U.S. may think it has brushed chattel slavery into the dustbin of history after the Civil War, but the country never did a very good job incinerating its traumatic remains, instead leaving embers that still burn today: an education system that fails black Americans, substandard health care that makes them more vulnerable to death and disease, and an economy that leaves millions without access to a living wage.

Adapted from https://time.com/5851855/systemic-racism-america/