George Floyd’s racist murder by police ignites our country’s conscience in a convergence of frustration, rage and despair of historic proportions.
This kind of wrenching disruption has happened before, but now occurs in a pandemic, in an economic meltdown and in a looming climate crisis. A horrifying reminder that wanton historical exploitation of people and of the environment have consequences. The widespread protests undergird an urgent need for systemic change.
Slavery and the servitude of people of color have been the backbone of American wealth since before its inception. Slavery is this country’s original sin. The U.S. Constitution compromised the promise of the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.”
There were amendments to remedy slavery, but there were always political, judicial and economic workarounds to disenfranchise and penalize people of color. It continues to this day. Its legacy is higher poverty, more chronic illness, fewer health resources, more polluted neighborhoods — all of which make African Americans more vulnerable to COVID-19 and climate risks.
It has been woven into the fabric of American society, mostly hidden but frayed at pressure points. Piecemeal repairs have littered the landscape. America has never acknowledged the toil or the toll of slavery and indentured servitude in the building of its economic might, and that its resulting prosperity has been unequally shared. Economic inequality waned between the two world wars, but has again risen to untenable heights.
America’s “Manifest Destiny” and increasingly consumption-based economy have exploited the land, and treated Native Americans and indigenous peoples as disposable nuisances when they claimed ancestral rights.
If those without voice or power, or the wild creatures could speak, would they too be protesting the loss of the prairies and the forests, and all the habitats that have despoiled? Would the whales and fish and coral that are sickened and dying in warming, plastic polluted waters wail of their plight? Would they too be saying “We can’t breathe”?
Natural resources are not limitless. More than 500,000 land species do not have enough natural habitat left to ensure their long-term survival, according to the Report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform and Biodiversity and EcoSystem. Our own health and survival depends on the health and biodiversity of the earth.
Our country’s social fabric is fraying even as the ecosystems of the earth are straining under human pressures and accompanying carbon pollution. It seems the very skies, filled with greenhouse gasses, and the rightfully indignant people in the streets, are all crying out for justice, for mitigation.
We have common cause. We need to face willful ignorance and hard-hearted rejection of responsibility with the evidence of historic and scientific facts, not myth and opinion.
We need to listen to and understand the stories of people that have lived the legacies of slavery and of discrimination. We must make room for them in the nation’s narratives and at the decision-making tables.
The climate crisis and COVID-19 do not recognize our social divisions. Yet they have inexorably laid bare our social and economic inequities by highlighting vulnerabilities and historic wrongs.
We now have a chance to help the Next Greatest Generation improve our American democracy by insisting on, and working with purpose to fulfill, its original promise of equality. We can do that by dealing with the climate crisis. We can build a prosperous, low carbon, circular economy that is healthy, environmentally just, and economically equitable. We can still live in pursuit of (redefined) happiness.
That is the “New Promise of the 21st Century.”
Kit Sang Boos lives in Northampton.