Officer Michael Lee of the Navajo Nation police department died of the coronavirus this week. He was 50 years old, not the first Navajo officer to be ill with it—there have been at least a dozen—but the first to die. The news appeared in two small Southwest papers when I Googled “Navajo and coronavirus.”
The BBC was there a week ago to chronicle the death of a 29 year-old Navajo woman who had once been a beauty pageant winner. I see by Google that CBS broadcast from Navajo in mid-June, and I know that the New York Times had a couple of stories from the Navajo Reservation before that. That’s when I started paying attention to it—and as far as I can tell, when the NYT stopped.
In a weird kind of addiction, I check the stats on US States daily, and Navajo Nation, which is, population wise, smaller than any state, gets its own line. They are at 350 deaths now, ticking away, 2-3-4 a day, climbing the ladder past the states, a week ago with 11 states below them in number of deaths, today 15. They are well past Oregon (202), Nebraska (267), and Kansas (270), and will undoubtedly soon pass New Hampshire and Oklahoma. Oregon is still up on Navajo with 8,094 total cases to 7,320—but the Navajo Nation’s total population is only 175,000!
Covid news has its own trajectory—Seattle started it; New York soon dominated with high numbers and astounding death tolls; Dr. Fauci, with Trump tagging along, caught our daily attention for a time. And then George Floyd and an almost simultaneous release of statistics about Covid Black deaths and Brown deaths turned White America’s attention to Black Lives Matter. Latinos caught a bit of it, but now it’s Florida and Texas with the big numbers.
A few Indian tribes have had local attention; the Navajo had their day with the national news. The Navajo—and other tribes—will survive. They’ve been down this road many times.
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Showing posts with label George Floyd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Floyd. Show all posts
Sunday, June 28, 2020
Friday, June 12, 2020
Pandemic 12--Fountain of Praise Church
Once, a very long time ago, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference struggled to carry on the “Poor People’s Campaign” and Resurrection City grew on the soggy Washington D.C. Mall, I found myself in a Baptist Church listening to Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and a large white woman from South Carolina. It was the kind of event that should have been captured in a diary or a saved church bulletin, but I was young and out to do good that day, with no notion of saving things so that I could think about them a half century later.
Listening to the service for George Floyd in the Fountain of Praise Church in Houston this week sent me back to that night, to another time when white Americans were caught up in the emotional truths of Black Americans’ struggles.
Last night I tried to explain the emotional surge—and truth—of singing “We Shall Overcome” in that church that night to my granddaughter. I remembered peace marches and civil rights gatherings, and Joan Baez marching arm in arm with MLK in Montgomery in 1965. I can hear her now singing—and hear myself singing—“We Shall Overcome some day…”
The white woman that night said that she knew that looking down on n….s was a way of keeping poor whites down, that she knew that she and her kin were the n….s now.
You can mount every rational argument about justice and equality, argue and negotiate your way to legislation, bring new textbooks to the classroom and body cams to the police forces, but in my book the hope for real transformation is in white Americans grasping once again the emotional truths of brown and black experiences.
George Floyd’s service in that black church in Houston brought that home.
# # #
Listening to the service for George Floyd in the Fountain of Praise Church in Houston this week sent me back to that night, to another time when white Americans were caught up in the emotional truths of Black Americans’ struggles.
Last night I tried to explain the emotional surge—and truth—of singing “We Shall Overcome” in that church that night to my granddaughter. I remembered peace marches and civil rights gatherings, and Joan Baez marching arm in arm with MLK in Montgomery in 1965. I can hear her now singing—and hear myself singing—“We Shall Overcome some day…”
The white woman that night said that she knew that looking down on n….s was a way of keeping poor whites down, that she knew that she and her kin were the n….s now.
You can mount every rational argument about justice and equality, argue and negotiate your way to legislation, bring new textbooks to the classroom and body cams to the police forces, but in my book the hope for real transformation is in white Americans grasping once again the emotional truths of brown and black experiences.
George Floyd’s service in that black church in Houston brought that home.
# # #
Thursday, June 4, 2020
9. Invisible Indians
A friend sent me a link to a video of Jingle Dancers and an Indian Drum at the George Floyd assassination site in Minneapolis. Indians rarely make the news, so this quite stunning event was not covered in any major news feeds I saw. And it is rarely and barely mentioned that Indians suffer discrimination and death at the hands of police as often or more often than do African-Americans.
The pandemic itself has hit Indians hard, but aside from the occasional story about the Navajo, we don’t get much news of it. I know from friends that this brings up generational memory of the impact of diseases on other reservations.
This beautiful video reminds us that Indians are still here in their country.
8. Incarceration
The news and pictures after George Floyd’s death have been numbing: protests; riot-geared police swinging nightsticks; police kneeling and marching with protestors; white supremacist infiltrators; “anarchists”; Trump tweeting, hiding in the White House, holding a Bible aloft and preaching militarism; looting, burning, and peaceful protest in over 60 cities here and more abroad.
I’ve had a hard time finding an edge to hang onto in this—and more importantly, a good story for tomorrow. Then came Danielle Allen in yesterday’s Washington Post. She’s Harvard, she’s black, and has her own sad family story. A cousin, incarcerated at 15, served an 11-year sentence for a failed carjacking and was killed by a man he’d met in prison.
Allen zeroes in on incarceration. And she has information that is new to me and I’m sure to most Americans. Our prisons, places we know incarcerate people of color at an inordinate rate and can turn petty wrong-doers into criminals, do not have to be this way. And they can be a key to unraveling the mess we’re in.
Allen suggests we “reduce our reliance on incarceration from 70 percent of the sanctions imposed in our criminal-justice system to 10 percent.” “This is not utopian,” she says. “The Netherlands uses incarceration at about this rate and Germany at [a] lower rate… If we pick this one goal and organize our energy around that, everything else will change — policing, drug policies, court processes, the depths of our despair, our health, our freedom, our economic opportunities. Everything.”
That’s bold, but a quick check says the US incarcerates 693 of 100,000 citizens; Germany 76; the Netherlands 69! Both use fines and other forms of community-based sentences and stress “normalization.”
Sens. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) have proposed a national commission tasked with “a comprehensive review of the criminal justice system.” Let them do it!
# # #
I’ve had a hard time finding an edge to hang onto in this—and more importantly, a good story for tomorrow. Then came Danielle Allen in yesterday’s Washington Post. She’s Harvard, she’s black, and has her own sad family story. A cousin, incarcerated at 15, served an 11-year sentence for a failed carjacking and was killed by a man he’d met in prison.
Allen zeroes in on incarceration. And she has information that is new to me and I’m sure to most Americans. Our prisons, places we know incarcerate people of color at an inordinate rate and can turn petty wrong-doers into criminals, do not have to be this way. And they can be a key to unraveling the mess we’re in.
Allen suggests we “reduce our reliance on incarceration from 70 percent of the sanctions imposed in our criminal-justice system to 10 percent.” “This is not utopian,” she says. “The Netherlands uses incarceration at about this rate and Germany at [a] lower rate… If we pick this one goal and organize our energy around that, everything else will change — policing, drug policies, court processes, the depths of our despair, our health, our freedom, our economic opportunities. Everything.”
That’s bold, but a quick check says the US incarcerates 693 of 100,000 citizens; Germany 76; the Netherlands 69! Both use fines and other forms of community-based sentences and stress “normalization.”
Sens. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) have proposed a national commission tasked with “a comprehensive review of the criminal justice system.” Let them do it!
# # #
7. “1967"
It feels like 1967, and CONTRA-19 feels like Vietnam. No sounds of choppers and gunfire, but the sirens of ambulances and the humming of refrigerated trucks holding dead bodies. The bodies are older, but the body count is higher.
I left the US for my Peace Corps tour in Turkey in July in 1965—a month before Watts blew up. There had been indications—“Freedom Summer” in ’63 in the South; the Kennedy assassination; a Vietnam teach-in I’d gone to at Northwestern in the fall of ’64; racial incidents in Eastern cities in that same year. But I left Peace Corps training at Portland State University in June with a pocketful of Kennedy half-dollars, a few hundred Turkish words and phrases, and the idealism of a 22 year-old convert to peace and the Peace Corps.
I came back to a radically different US in the summer of 1967. Vietnam had moved from the background to the headlines. There were daily body counts, of our dead and General Westmoreland’s precise if fabricated statistics of the North Vietnamese dead. Dr. King had linked the Civil Rights movement to Vietnam in an April speech.
I took a Peace Corps staff job and lived at DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. Vietnam was on our minds as we focused our work lives on the rest of the world. The country was divided. “Hard hats” were the MAGA hats of the day. I and 100,000 others marched on the Pentagon in October.
The calendar turned. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April; D. C. erupted. We were curfewed as the city burned. In June Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
Today’s pandemic is the drumbeat of our lives, like Vietnam was in 1967. George Floyd’s killing and today’s riots feel like the spring of 1968.
# # #
I left the US for my Peace Corps tour in Turkey in July in 1965—a month before Watts blew up. There had been indications—“Freedom Summer” in ’63 in the South; the Kennedy assassination; a Vietnam teach-in I’d gone to at Northwestern in the fall of ’64; racial incidents in Eastern cities in that same year. But I left Peace Corps training at Portland State University in June with a pocketful of Kennedy half-dollars, a few hundred Turkish words and phrases, and the idealism of a 22 year-old convert to peace and the Peace Corps.
I came back to a radically different US in the summer of 1967. Vietnam had moved from the background to the headlines. There were daily body counts, of our dead and General Westmoreland’s precise if fabricated statistics of the North Vietnamese dead. Dr. King had linked the Civil Rights movement to Vietnam in an April speech.
I took a Peace Corps staff job and lived at DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. Vietnam was on our minds as we focused our work lives on the rest of the world. The country was divided. “Hard hats” were the MAGA hats of the day. I and 100,000 others marched on the Pentagon in October.
The calendar turned. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April; D. C. erupted. We were curfewed as the city burned. In June Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
Today’s pandemic is the drumbeat of our lives, like Vietnam was in 1967. George Floyd’s killing and today’s riots feel like the spring of 1968.
# # #
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