Shouting Into the Institutional Void Demonstrators are hammering on a hollowed-out structure, and it very well may collapse. ........... In July 1967, immediately after the riots in Newark and Detroit, President Lyndon B. Johnson created a commission to study the causes and prevention of urban unrest. The Kerner Commission—named for its chairman, Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois—was an emblem of its moment. ........... “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The report called for far-reaching policy reforms in housing, employment, education, and policing, to stop the country from becoming “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” .............. It was too much for Johnson, who resented not being credited for his efforts to achieve civil rights and eradicate poverty, and whose presidency had just been engulfed by the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam. He shelved the report. A few weeks later, on the evening of April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis. The next night, Johnson—who had just announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection—spoke to a country whose cities were burning from coast to coast. “It is the fiber and the fabric of the republic that’s being tested,” he said. “If we are to have the America that we mean to have, all men of all races, all regions, all religions must stand their ground to deny violence its victory in this sorrowful time, and in all times to come. Last evening, after receiving the terrible news of Dr. King’s death, my heart went out to his family and to his people, especially to the young Americans who I know must sometimes wonder if they are to be denied a fullness of life because of the color of their skin.” To an aide, he was more blunt in assessing the uprising: “What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for 300 years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.” ............ King’s murder and the riots it sparked propelled Congress to pass, by an overwhelming and bipartisan margin, the decade’s last major piece of civil-rights legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which enforced fair standards in housing. Johnson signed it on April 11. It was too late. The very best reports, laws, and presidential speeches couldn’t contain the anger in the streets. That year, 1968, was when reform was overwhelmed by radicalization on the left and reaction on the right. We still live in the aftermath. The language and ideas of the Kerner Report have haunted the years since—a reminder of a missed chance. ............... The difference between 1968 and 2020 is the difference between a society that failed to solve its biggest problem and a society that no longer has the means to try. ........ The protesters aren’t speaking to leaders who might listen, or to a power structure that might yield, except perhaps the structure of white power, which is too vast and diffuse to respond. Congress isn’t preparing a bill to address root causes; Congress no longer even tries to solve problems. No president, least of all this one, could assemble a commission of respected figures from different sectors and parties to study the problem of police brutality and produce a best-selling report with a consensus for fundamental change. A responsible establishment doesn’t exist. Our president is one of the rioters. ............. Levers of influence no longer connect to sources of power. Democratic protections—the eyes of a free press, the impartiality of the law, elected officials acting out of conscience or self-interest—have lost public trust. The protesters are railing against a society that isn’t cohesive enough to summon a response. They’re hammering on a hollowed-out structure, and it very well may collapse. ................ If 2020 were at all like 1968, the president would go on national television and speak as the leader of all Americans to try to calm a rattled country in a tumultuous time. But the Trump administration hasn’t answered the unrest like an embattled democracy trying to reestablish legitimacy. Its reflex is that of an autocracy—a display of strength that actually reveals weakness, emptiness. Trump’s short walk from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church had all the trappings of a strongman trying to show that he was still master of the country amid reports that he’d taken refuge in a bunker: the phalanx of armored guards surrounding him as he strutted out of the presidential palace; the tear gas and beatings that cleared his path of demonstrators and journalists; the presence of his daughter, who had come up with the idea, and his top general, wearing combat fatigues as if to signal that the army would defend the regime against the people, and his top justice official, who had given the order to raid the square. ................ William Barr has reacted to the killing of George Floyd like the head of a secret-police force rather than the attorney general of a democratic republic. ............. The protests have to be understood in the context of this institutional void. They resemble the spontaneous mass cry of a people suffering under dictatorship more than the organized projection of public opinion aimed at an accountable government. They signify that democratic politics has stopped working. They are both utopian and desperate............. the overwhelming message of the protests is simply “end racism,” which would be a large step toward ending evil itself. ......... For white protesters—who are joining demonstrations on behalf of black freedom and equality in large numbers for the first time since Selma, Alabama, 55 years ago—this demand means ending an evil that lies within themselves. It would be another sign of a hollow democracy if the main energy in the afterglow of the protests goes into small-group sessions on white privilege rather than a hard push for police reform. ........... The immediate context of the protests helps explain their breadth and intensity: three years of the bigoted and cruel presidency of Donald Trump; three months of the worst pandemic in a century, with more than 100,000 Americans dead and 40 million unemployed. Trump’s utter failure to protect Americans from COVID-19 and his indifference to suffering that fell most heavily on poor, black, and brown people, and to the economic ravages that followed—injustice on this scale burned like smothered coals in millions of homes and hearts during the months of quarantine. The easing of the lockdown and the video of a man’s life being crushed out of him came at the same moment, and the anger received a tremendous burst of oxygen............. the collision between pandemic and protest .......... The coronavirus doesn’t care if it’s stopped trending on Twitter. ........... it’s impossible not to worry that the curve, finally bent in New York and other cities, is about to spike upward .......... There’s an election coming in five months. It won’t end racism or the pandemic, or repair our social bonds, or restore our democracy to health. But it could give us a chance to try, if we get that far.
India Risks Junk Status As Economy Faces 10% Contraction The problem, of course, is that Indian growth is now grinding to a halt. India’s 3.1% growth from January to March are as good as things get as Covid-19 fallout upends global demand. Former finance secretary Subhash Chandra Garg expects the economy to contract by 10% this fiscal year, India’s first time in the red in more than 40 years. .......... These risks, though, would be a lot less troubling if Modi had used the last 2,200 days to get under the hood of a stalling economy.
Coronavirus News (133) https://t.co/LtaoULun3X #CoronavirusOutbreak #CoronavirusFacts #india #UnitedStates #BlackLivesMatter #COVIDー19 #COVID #Lockdown5 #Pandemia
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) June 7, 2020
No comments:
Post a Comment