Weighty knee for nine minutes upon the neck of a fellow human being! It’s called Lynching

By Ed Angelo

‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not goanna take this anymore,” Was the famous outcry from the broadcaster in the movie, Network? Here’s my version. But I can’t shout it because I have a knee on my throat, a body above the knee, and my moans for mercy are ignored. This knee has become my God!

But it’s really the knee of an entire nation, and that’s pretty heavy. Try this: hold your breath as long as you can. Make a game of it. George Floyd played that game, against his will, and the knee won. The knee always wins.

Watching that powerful knee on Mr. Floyd’s throat, I saw the fork in our nation’s road: one path to love and decency, the other to the depths of hatred and destruction. You learned it from what survived the sanitized white history account you were fed in high school: “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.” But even that hallowed truth required a bullet to the back of the head to survive being expurgated. Our national knee is violence.

Like many of us, I am so deeply saddened and enraged by the most recent racial lynching, I just don’t give a damm anymore who hears me. One horrific death after other floats by like some macabre Disney spectacular, yet we do nothing. Why? Because it always happens somewhere else? Well, it’s here, it’s in America, it’s in our backyard! Watch the full video of George Floyd’s slow, murderous execution, beginning to end–and just look out your kitchen window as you wash the dishes, because it’s happening right there in your backyard!

And, in a way, even more barbarous than the instantaneousness of MLK’s assassin’s bullet. More masochistic than the whiplash of a noose growing our uniquely American “strange fruit”. Worse because this snuffing away of another’s God-given life came equipped with the glare of a police officer as citizens, powerless to intervene, begged to awaken the officer to his own humanity that he would awaken to recognize the human being dying beneath his knee, dying from the weight of the knee, crushed by the juggernaut of his badge.

The same knee morally drowns us just round the bend, downstream from the headwaters of hatred springing deliberately and designedly and directly from the top of our political river! Even this second, so many mindlessly bath in that hate-filled stream.

For instance, why, if I say, Black lives matter, do so many whites have a knee-jerk reaction to respond that all lives matter? We respond to the profound race-related murders with the ever-present trite twitch of a knee. There’s that all-powerful knee again.

Consider this: a killing 10 times worse than Eric Garner’s killing? No way, right?

But then came Ahmaud Arbery’s cold-blooded murder.

Or a killing perhaps even worse than Mr. Arbery’s, can’t be!

Then came the slow torture and murder of George Floyd, committed under the very color of law, a veritable tableau of hatred frozen in stone.  That knee reaches down and feel it on your leg. That knee feels it on your own neck. That knee–that’s America’s knee!

Two knees (see the link below) tell the racial story of America, and it isn’t the greatness we love to ridiculously boast. And it’s sure as hell is not “post-racial”, as many like to espouse as a balm for their conscience. Much of white America froths at the mouth with righteous anger when they see Colin Kaepernick’s knee touch the grass, but where is the frenzy and fury when the weighty knee of this entire hemisphere lands for nine minutes upon the neck of a fellow human being? Where’s the recognition that the knee has been there for 400 years?

https://www.upworthy.com/mlk-daughter-shares-powerful-kneeling-message

So, what to do?

Got power? Use it for right. Got a voice? Let’s hear denouncements. Got a newspaper? Use ink and paper. Have a vote? Crawl, if you must, to the booth. Lead a police force or prosecutor’s office? Educate, sensitize, humanize. Lead a classroom, school, school district, or college? Teach the undeniable seeds of these 21st century racial assassinations that were firmly planted, for cold hard cash, centuries ago.

And if you worship a just God, take a knee, no, take two—and pray for love, for justice, for an end to the killing.

About Carma Henry 24455 Articles
Carma Lynn Henry Westside Gazette Newspaper 545 N.W. 7th Terrace, Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33311 Office: (954) 525-1489 Fax: (954) 525-1861

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