And who would that be?
It's not "being oppressed" when you are arrested for breaking the law.
It is being oppressed when you are assaulted, attacked, arrested, and harassed when all you've done is be black.
It is being oppressed when you are more likely to die in a confrontation with police simply because of the color of your skin, and especially when you do not resist, cooperate, and still have your life snuffed from you.
It is being oppressed when you are shot because the officer "felt threatened" and all you did was be black.
It is being oppressed when you are pulled over for being black.
It is being oppressed when you are stopped and interrogated for being black.
If cops were doing their job the way they were supposed to, there wouldn't be protests. There wouldn't be decades of outrage that fomented, bubbled up, and finally burst out into the open.
George Floyd is not an anomaly. George Floyd wasn't the worst that's ever happened, but it was but another in a long line, in a long history of consistent, continued, systemic injustice. It wasn't a lone cop going rogue, it is par for the course. This is what policing in America does to, and looks like, to African Americans. And it's what it has looked like for decades.
This is a pattern and a system that has been going on since the end of the American Civil War. It is the system and pattern that arose in the post-war American South during Reconstruction as southern Democrats pushed hard to set poor white southerners against "the negro" through propaganda and legislation. In the antebellum south the black slave was seen as simple, they needed the life of servility under white masters to help show them the way of civilization, though of course they could never truly ever be equal or free because the "natural condition" of "the negro" was akin to a child, and needed to be servile, and shown the proper discipline like a child for his own good. But what happened after Emancipation, what happened after the Civil War? What happened during Reconstruction? Oh, well now that the black man was free, he was a threat! The feral lusts of the black man had to be contained, you can't just let black people do whatever they want, just think of the women and the children!
And so southern Democrats and a host of other southern propagandists began their efforts to re-write the history of the war, and the Lost Cause myth was born. Why, the war wasn't fought over slavery they said, it was a war over states rights! The cause of the Confederacy was actually just! It was a war against northern tyranny over the freedom of the states to self-govern themselves. Yeah, that's it! And, in fact, Abraham Lincoln wasn't himself even really a supporter of abolition until it was politically advantageous for him to do so! And the Union soldiers? They weren't fighting to free slaves, they were simply fighting a war of "Northern Aggression". Heavens to Betsy don't you know!?
And, why, we can't have these uppity black people going around voting for whoever they want, I mean, they might vote to have a black man to Congress, and while the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution guaranteed all [male] citizens the right to vote, that doesn't mean that we really have to let them vote right? No no no, they need to be carefully monitored, they need the proper identification, and they need to be reminded about who is really in charge around these parts, and that's white folks.
Insert Jim Crow.
Why, you know, why should these black people be even drinking from the same water fountains as us? The same toilets? This is ridiculous. Black people and white people are too fundamentally incompatible, and so everybody can be separate but equal, so white people get their schools, their neighborhoods, their drinking fountains, their bathrooms, and black people get theirs.
Now, of course, we can't let black people really have a shot of upward mobility, so we'll draw these red lines around black neighborhoods, and the banks won't lend to those neighborhoods. And the schools in those neighborhoods? Well they don't really need funding do they? That money should go to where it belongs, hard working white folk who created this fine white nation of ours.
Lynchings.
The KKK.
Segregation.
Voter intimidation.
Erecting Confederate monuments and symbols to terrorize black people.
Jury-rigging to ensure that white people, including cops, never get in trouble for killing a black person; and definitely making sure that black people get the harshest punishments.
Keep black people from speaking up too loudly, why they must be Marxists! Soviet sympathizers! These radicals are destabalizing the country. They are causing a raucous commotion and disturbing the peace, why can't they just know how good they got it by our hand spoon-feeding them just enough that they stay servile and complicit to the status quo.
Why does that communist and traitor Martin Luther King keep causing so much problem, everywhere he goes violence follows. The cops would leave them alone if they woudn't break the law. Why are they trying to integrate schools, why are they sitting down in restaurants and disturbing the peace. We're just trying to have a nice Sunday afternoon meal at the local diner, why do they have to cause so much violence by coming and sitting near us? They aren't slaves any more, isn't that what they wanted? Isn't it enough for them to leave us alone and to just go be black somewhere else? Why do they have to come here with those black faces of theirs to scare our children?
So hoses spraying water at marchers.
Unleashing attack dogs to maul at the peaceful protestors.
Terrorism wearing a police badge and in the name of democracy.
And time.
And time again.
Over and over and over again.
Constantly.
Repeatedly.
Systematically.
Horrifically.
Black lives snuffed out of existence, and no accountability by the perpetrators.
Black lives forced to live sub-standard and sub-human existences because of a history of systemic prejudice and hard-wired racism in the very fabric of the American republic.
A failure to fund black communities.
A failure to fund black education.
A failure to provide relief and social stability to impoverished black neighborhoods.
Forcing some people to turn to less than reputable sources of income.
Forging a war against drugs to specifically and explicitly target black people.
Making being black he crime itself.
Yeah. Oppressed people. That's what it is. That's what it has always been. Because my country, the United States of America, has for 244 years REFUSED to do anything substantial to address the evils perpetrated against an entire people based solely on the fact that they were brought here against their will and happen to be black. Freeing the slaves? Great. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments? Fantastic. There have been major strides--but in the trenches of real life things continue to be an abominable mess, an abhorrent assault against the basic humanity of people based solely on the color of their skin.
Refusing to acknowledge this is to refuse to acknowledge the truth of history. To refuse to acknowledge this is to be complicit in the future propagation of injustice. There is no neutrality. As Dr. King said silence is betrayal. There can be no "white moderate" in this fight for equality and justice.
This is a moral fight.
This is a fight for what is good, and right, and just for all; not just some.
One can either stand with the oppressed or one can stand with the oppressor. There is no middle ground.
Jesus Christ told us clearly which side we are to be on here. And so not only is the question of do we side with the oppressed or the oppressor, but also do we stand with Jesus Christ, or do we betray Him by turning our backs against the poor, the disenfranchised, and the oppressed?
There is no middle ground.
-CryptoLutheran
