By David K. Shipler
Again
and again, we are cheated. Those of us who celebrate the embrace of justice are
allowed elation only for a while. Then the inevitable bigotry awakens from what
turns out to be a shallow slumber.
The saga
of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is the latest to lift the mood and then crush
it. Their royal wedding in 2018 drew an estimated 1.9 billion viewers
worldwide, not only for the splendor but also for the elevation of racial inclusion:
a biracial American joining the British royal family, an expansion past ancient
limits into the broader world. And how fitting, given the United Kingdom’s
increasing racial and ethnic diversity. We were entitled to our euphoria, as naïve
as it was.
Barack Obama
gave us that, too. On election night in 2008, television screens radiated with
tears for the healing of history, notably the streaming eyes of Jesse Jackson,
no fan of Obama but a courier of reform. Who will forget his face? But then,
the first “black” US president—also biracial—became the target of ugly
caricatures and epithets, facilitating the prejudices that Donald Trump rode
into the White House eight years later. Euphoria, it seems, is always stalked
by hatred: Emancipation by Jim Crow, Obama by Trump, voting rights by voting
suppression.
Last year,
the murders of blacks by police—nothing new, but now recorded for all to
witness—propelled the largest outpouring in history of white Americans demonstrating
for racial justice. In big cities and small towns across the country, week
after week, whites went with blacks into the streets, driven by the terrible,
long video of the white Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin kneeling fatally on
the neck of the unarmed black man George Floyd.
Not since the brutality of segregationists against nonviolent civil rights demonstrators in the 1950s and 60s had the conscience of white America been animated so intensely. It was uplifting. It brought a kind of indignant ecstasy, a declaration that Black Lives Matter, meaning of course that black lives also matter, that black lives matter, too, not just white lives, that too often have black lives been seen as not to matter. Pride in this arousal of morality was not allowed to last long enough.
