Equal Rights

As a backdrop against the July 4th holiday, which many Americans leverage to enjoy celebrating our country’s 1776 Independence from Great Britain, it seems apropos to explore, contrast, and expose the ongoing, overt lack of independence unjustly denied America’s Brown and Black citizens.

At the heart of social justice is the[ collective’s] moral obligation to stand up for individuals’ equal rights – rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to opportunity, property, and dignity within the social construct where these rights are both recognized, but more importantly, protected.  When we understand who we are in relationship to the cause (social change) and who or what the cause is to us (in this article, we highlight the denial of America’s Brown and Black citizens of their equal rights), we more reliably communicate our message to a lost, maladapted and dysfunctional world. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood this, as did many other active participants of the Civil Rights Movement and what I call today’s Black Empowerment Movement.

On the 180°opposite end of America’s social justice spectrum is a concept called “cognitive inertia.”  Cognitive inertia, simply stated, is the tendency for beliefs, or sets of beliefs, to endure once they are formed.  Cognitive inertia may explain human behaviors like the destructive authoritarian forces in play during the famous Milgram Experiment, or it may explain society’s unwillingness to get involved when we see someone doing something wrong to someone but don’t intervene to stop it because we’ve been taught to “mind our own business.”  Similarly, cognitive inertia may explain why some white parents inculcate their children to dislike other children simply because of their skin color, advancing a negative and destructive set of beliefs that fuels continued racism still recognizably evident in our country today. 

Admittedly, it should not be surprising for any of us to follow the logic that humans are creatures of habit.  Generally, we tend to: take the same steps to prepare ourselves to go out for the day; take the same route to and from our employment daily; order and pick up the same coffee from the same drive-thru en route to work; purchase the same brand of laundry detergent and categorize our laundry for hot/cold/gentle cycles, etc.  These become such rote behaviors that we often do them on auto-pilot, without even thinking about them and thus, that familiarity becomes our comfort zone (our space of cognitive inertia), whether or not that familiarity encompasses aspects that are antithetical to our collective [society at-large’s] comfort! 

Aspects that are antithetical to our collective comfort would be scenarios about which we are concerned that cause us to question our foundational truths –  those beliefs that were formed early, or repetitively, in our lives and especially those beliefs that were foisted upon our developing brains by rigid, less racially-accepting parents; the beliefs and fallacies that others taught us which we never questioned but should have; and the beliefs that remain in our social construct today which unfairly and unjustly continue to keep Brown and Black American citizens from experiencing the true American freedoms-that Social Justice Warriors continue to battle on a daily basis:  These are the exact same rights Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. organized so many marches to draw attention to and elevate awareness about…the Equal Rights that are Recognized and Protected for ALL of America’s citizens; Brown and Black included!

Lies should never become comforts to which we become so accustomed as to allow them to continue unchecked!  Each of us, regardless of skin color, should be an advocate, an ally, a Social Justice Warrior fighting the good fight – the fight for Equality, for “Freedom and Justice for All” as our Declaration of Independence asserts for every American citizen.  I hope I’m not the only person in the room who missed the part of our Declaration of Independence that said, “…Freedom and Justice for all, but only if you are white/Anglo.”

Let’s park that for a moment and fast forward from 1776 to the 1950s and 60s and to the infamous Civil Rights Movement – a Movement that began and continued because American freedoms were denied to Black and Brown American citizens! When I reflect back upon the Civil Rights Movement (I was a mere child at the time), I witnessed many of the “marched against” injustices first-hand growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia.   Too many of the News Reels our neighbors came over to watch aired film footage of peaceful, well-dressed people marching, singing, and holding each other’s hands, and some carried signs on wooden sticks.  The News Reels showed individuals who were peacefully demonstrating (as I would learn many years later from my own Black History research).  The footage showed these non-violent individuals being brutally hit over their heads with police nightsticks, mercilessly dragged on the ground while handcuffed (some by their hair) with their hands behind their backs (both men and women), and showed them being hosed down by what must have been painful skin-tearing water forced through fire hoses at high pressure from fire hydrants.  The police were shown releasing their police dogs into the crowds of marchers, and I watched with a tear-stained face as their dogs bit several of the marchers and knocked others down on the ground, growling menacingly in their faces with strings of salvia foaming from their bared, sharp teeth. 

These News Reel scenes were vivid, shocking and left an indelible mark in my psyche about something terribly wrong.  This, all of this, for simply peacefully protesting and walking alongside each other –  marching – together for miles to gather in Selma, Alabama.  As a child, seeing people treated like this made my head race and my blood boil!

I had also witnessed first-hand sightings of Ku-Klux-Klansmen dressed in their ominous white head-to-toe robes with tall, pointed hats and white masks with circles cut-out for them to look through from behind their mask, which otherwise hid their faces.  There were a few times, during some of our family travels (always by car) that we would see them assembled in masses and carrying fire-lit torches, often near sun-set, headed to God only knew where…to do what only God knew.  I would later learn that they did their deeds to innocent people at night – the likes of which would be reported on the News Reels several days later.  Their targets, of course, were people who happened to have skin that was darker than mine.  And, for that reason only were they treated in these inhumane, uncivilized, unconscionable and unforgiveable ways! 

Let’s fast forward 100 years, more or less to a few short years ago just immediately prior to the “official” onset of COVID in the United States.  Within three short months (one month before COVID’s official “beginning” recognized in the US [as March 1, 2020] and less than two short months after COVID’s official beginning), when two very different yet highly significant, and newsworthy scenarios unfolded in different, yet memorable places in our country.  These are scenarios that should have caused every Social Justice Warrior – in America and around the globe – to reassert his/her vows to end “cognitive inertia” – that fallacious tenet that once our beliefs are established, they endure forever. 

On February 23, 2020, a 25-year old Black man was jogging through a upscale, emerging neighborhood and stopped to get a drink of water from a residential construction site spigot.  Two white onlookers took notice of the young man’s actions from inside their homes and decided to confront the thirsty runner, with a shotgun.  Moments later, Ahmaud Arbery lay dead on the ground – the price he paid for a sip of water! 

On May 25, 2020, our nation –  nay, the entire world –  watched, in shock-filled horror and disbelief – as three police officers stood idly by and watched a fourth police officer as he knelt on the neck of George Floyd, ensuring he couldn’t breathe…and remained kneeling on Floyd’s neck long after he was unconscious, and – thanks to cell phone video – the entire world was able to see George Floyd life extinguished (almost in real time)! 

And we have the audacity to call ourselves “civilized”. 

This word, civilized, brings to mind a quote my undergraduate Anthropology Professor, Dr. David E. Stuart, told his students one evening class – and this is important, so re-read this two or three times until it really sinks in (just fyi, Dr. Stuart spent his academic lifetime studying behavioral patterns of early civilizations).  He said: “Civilizations are defined not by how they treat their members when everyone is watching, but by how they treat their members when no one is!”[1]  Again, let that sink in because we’ve seen a lot of shady stuff in the past and also in our present.  Are we “civilized”?  Many areas of this article – and real live America – depict that we are not!

“All cruelty begins with dehumanization — not seeing the face of the other, not seeing the whole humanity of the other…In that fertile ground, racial biases…spread and become entrenched.”[2]

So, what has changed in the last 100+ years?  Answer:  Nothing much!

In the early 1900s, African American/Black women were involuntarily sterilized to prevent them from reproducing and as a form of “birth control” to limit the number of children they could birth.[3]  Today, on average, three times more African American/Black women die during childbirth than their white counter-parts[4].

Back in the 1900s, African Americans/Blacks were not offered palliative care as they suffered and died from various cancers[5].  Today, African Americans/Blacks are not offered palliative care as they die from various cancers[6], often leaning on lame or baseless reasons like “they have not prepared advanced directives for their end-of-life care and treatment options”.  Palliative care is “comfort care” and is not contingent upon having any advance directives or end-of-life documented instructions.  Palliative care is for the comfort of the patient to mitigate pain. Period.  Willfully, deliberately withholding palliative care is cruel, inhumane torture unbefitting “civilized” society!