‘Fierce urgency of now’: NC Black leaders say 2020 is the time to start ending racism
Last month, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II gave a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral saying that America’s current reckoning with racism is really about death no longer being societally acceptable.
That’s because “the reality is that racist policies, rooted in economic injustice, have a death measure,” Barber said.
Before George Floyd died under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis, Barber said, he had been infected with the coronavirus as an essential worker. He was already suffering from systemic racism due to a lack of economic opportunity and federal assistance, like other Black and brown people today in the pandemic.
This was the fundamental topic behind an online panel hosted by McClatchy’s North Carolina newspapers. “Breaking Point: Tackling Systemic Racism in North Carolina” brought together Black leaders, scholars and politicians who spoke Thursday afternoon about confronting racism in the state and the nation.
In addition to Barber, U.S. Rep. Alma Adams, Charlotte activist Bree Newsome, Elizabeth City State University professor Melissa N. Stuckey, Kristie Puckett Williams of the ACLU of North Carolina and Charlotte city councilman Braxton Winston joined the discussion. It was moderated by Charlotte Observer opinion editor Peter St. Onge.
“We must decide in this country that we’re going to live up to the first promise of this democracy of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” Barber said.
Adams said government policies have harmed Black and brown people’s voting rights, health care access and economic opportunity and the pandemic has magnified it.
“We do believe there is a fierce urgency of now,” said Adams. “We’ve got to address these issues, we can’t wait. People need to have access to health care, people need to have access to safe, clean, affordable housing.”
“Even before COVID, Black folks have always known ... we have always known, we have always experienced this,” said Adams. “But now everyone has an opportunity to see it. I think we’ve got to work together collectively at the local, the state and the federal level to make these things come to pass.”
Racism of American systems
The latter half of the conversation focused on reimagining laws and public safety.
Policing is always a flash point in race relations because police are called on to enforce unjust laws, said Newsome, whose activism involved pulling down the Confederate flag at the South Carolina state house in 2015.
In a housing crisis that already affected mostly Black people and with the pandemic likely to generate an eviction crisis, police will be called to remove people from their homes, Newsome said.
“We have to really look not just at the police forces as a source of violence but the laws that they are called upon to enforce, because that is really the source of structural racism,” said Newsome.
Congress hasn’t fought these issues hard enough, she said, and unemployed people of color didn’t receive the robust federal aid that focused mostly on capital rather than people.
A discussion of American policing was moderated by Michael Williams, consultant and founder of the Black on Black Project, who asked panelists about rethinking policing as it is and about its racist history.
“The idea of free Black people moving about in the public space without being controlled by others,” said professor Stuckey, is the root of much police violence against Black Americans.
Current laws against vagrancy and loitering are remnants of the first American police forces, which acted as slave patrols before the Civil War.
“Police are doing what they have done historically,” echoed Puckett. “They may make some changes, they may recalibrate, but basically what they are doing is brutalizing Black people.”
Protesters against police brutality being met by police brutality in the past months is proof of this, she says.
“It’s about controlling how, where and when Black people show up,” Puckett said.
What change can look like
Williams asked Puckett to respond to a tweet from President Donald Trump — “when the looting starts, the shooting starts— that harkened back to threats made against protesters during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
Puckett said it reminded her that the use of force continually disconnects police from the Black community. The use of force shows how police are an “illegitimate way” of meeting the goal of public safety and order, like how mass incarceration doesn’t meet the goal of ending crime.
The goal of order and safety is met by giving communities the resources they need to live good lives and avoid the conditions that can lead to crime, she said.
Councilman Winston said it’s up to local governments to rethink ways to meet the needs of citizens, especially during the pandemic, and that it involves switching out existing systems instead of reforming them.
“We can change the response when someone calls 911 … create a system for first responders that is needed,” Winston said.
Large tent cities of homeless people in Charlotte show, he added, that housing resources are needed that don’t currently exist.
This current moment of racial reckoning is a unique time, Stuckey said, that reminds her of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution.
“Civil disobedience, which sometimes does include breaking the law, is part and parcel of how our society fundamentally changes,” said Stuckey. “We are in a moment where we have an opportunity and we are seizing it to create profound change, sustained change and sustainable change in the United States right now.”
This story was originally published July 16, 2020 at 3:49 PM.
