How deep does American racism go?
And is it possible to uproot it?
Or will it simply — endlessly — shift shape, wrap itself in the political correctness of the day and morph, say, from slavery to Jim Crow, from Jim Crow to stand-your-ground laws, gerrymandering and voter suppression?
At some point, the forces of sanity and survival must prevail and we must face this stain on the national soul with terrifying and transcendent honesty — and eliminate it. But how, oh God, how?
Every “legal” murder — by police, by private citizens — of a human being of color brings up such questions. The most recent race-entangled murder to suddenly explode across the headlines is that of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old man who was shot and killed on Feb. 23, while jogging in Brunswick, Ga. Two white men — a father (a former employee of the local District Attorney’s office) and his son — had seen him running through their neighborhood, assumed he was a criminal, grabbed their guns and stalked him down. The local DA, George Barnhill, refused to prosecute the case. No charges were filed against the two men for 74 days — until after a video of the shooting was made public.
