Church and Community to Breathe Again
There were those who were belongings their jiff and did non even know it. They had suspended their respiration — instinctively only unconsciously — because for so long, none of usa accept been able to exhale in an atmosphere polluted by discrimination, white supremacy, implicit bias and racist brutality.
We expected the worst, considering history has taught the states to assume it. No justice. No accountability. No peace that tin can terminal.
When the verdict was read — guilty on all counts — we could breathe again. I breathed a sigh of relief, because I did not call back America could endure another killer cop walking free while a Blackness human being lay vi feet under. One of my elder colleagues told me that she could non "wrap her caput around" a scenario where Derek Chauvin was acquitted.
Paul Robeson Ford
The significance of Tuesday's verdict was not then much that Chauvin was found guilty, simply that George Floyd was proved innocent — innocent of the capital crime of existence Black in America.
Like nearly every other single trial involving a white police perpetrator and a Black victim, Floyd had been put on trial by the defense, even though Chauvin was the 1 who was actually facing charges of murder and manslaughter. Floyd's character and conduct, and past and present history of drug use, were all scrutinized and exposed in an effort to make articulate that Chauvin was without fault and Floyd was guilty, and his guilt justified and excused his execution on the streets of Minneapolis.
And then there was proficient reason for my colleague to struggle with conceiving of a scenario where more than ix minutes with a knee on the neck of a Black man was not plenty to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that George Floyd's life did not matter to Derek Chauvin (or the other cops who stood by while it happened). In that location was good reason to be preemptively appalled at the possibility of Chauvin walking abroad from all this without any accountability.
Information technology has happened so many times before, but it could not possibly happen this time, correct?
Perchance that'due south why some people were holding their jiff and did not even know it. Their bodies were arrested past the possibility that justice would be deferred and denied again. Their bodies — and perhaps even their spirits — had adapted to a status where no one seemed willing to do anything about the pollution that was killing them slowly.
The jury was supposed to come in at four:twenty EST. It was close to 5:00 before the gauge read the verdicts. How much longer could anyone accept held their breath without passing out? How much longer would the body have continued to function ordinarily without showing the effects of the lack of air? Information technology was most like a suicidal ideation that our bodies had internalized and made manifest in the flesh. Racism is killing u.s..
"The acquittal of George Floyd on all counts allows us to exhale once again."
The acquittal of George Floyd on all counts allows u.s. to exhale once more — at to the lowest degree momentarily; and it is a sign of resurrection made real in this Eastertide season. If resurrection means anything, it is that expiry does not have the last word, and that those who could non breathe can breathe again.
James Cone one time described the Cross every bit "victory by way of failure." He could only say that because he stood near 2,000 years from that fateful Friday that was anything only "good" at the time.
We were all hanging on the cross with George Floyd until v:00 EST Tuesday. We were all hanging at that place, waiting to breathe again, knowing deep downward that there was a possibility that we might have to surrender the ghost and exist finished with any notion that this moment in time was different than and then many others that we accept seen before.
One of the senior saints at my church told me that God had "shown me something new" on Tuesday evening — remarking further that "I never thought I would alive to come across a white police officer convicted of murder for killing a Black man." This particular woman has more than than a quarter century of life on me; but as I thought about it, I'm not so sure that I thought I would alive to see that day either.
Maybe that'due south why I was holding my breath, too.
In recent years, I have come to believe that Theodore Parker'due south observation (made famous by Martin Luther King Jr.) that the "arc of the moral universe is long, simply information technology bends toward justice" needs to be revised. Perchance it is more accurate to say that "the arc of the moral universe is long, merely it can be bent toward justice."
"Maybe information technology is more than accurate to say that 'the arc of the moral universe is long, but it tin be aptitude toward justice.'"
Information technology can be bent by jurors who finally cull to believe that Black Lives Matter. It can be bent by police officers who are finally willing to intermission the "blue wall" and bear witness confronting other cops. It can be bent past judges who finally choose to embrace impartiality instead of rationalizing their ain prejudicial ideals as white people while hiding in black robes.
We can curve the arc of the moral universe with these hands; just in society for us to practise and then, we have to finally see the truth about ourselves, nosotros have to finally see the racist smog in the air, and we have to decide that information technology is time to build a world where everyone can exhale.
George Floyd is just one man who was acquitted for the crime of being Blackness in America. There are and so many more whose breathless bodies are yet waiting for justice and accountability and the affirmation that they, also, were innocent. So now that we can breathe over again, we must exist prepared to enhance our voices and say their names, too.
The old hymn says, "Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel, and why non every man?" The work of deliverance for every human and adult female (both cisgendered and transgendered) lies ahead. Keep animate, keep struggling, continue pressing on. Deliverance is coming.
Paul Robeson Ford serves equally senior pastor of Outset Baptist Church (Highland Avenue) in Winston-Salem, N.C. He was born and raised in New York Metropolis and grew up at the Riverside Church nether the leadership of James A. Forbes Jr. He received a chief of divinity degree from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, where he is now a candidate for the Ph.D. in theology.
Related articles:
What should we learn from the Derek Chauvin verdict? | Opinion by Mark Wingfield
George Floyd and the silence of white evangelical America | Opinion past Andrew Manis
Justice for George Floyd: what went incorrect and how to brand information technology right | Opinion past Wendell Griffen
Source: https://baptistnews.com/article/george-floyd-found-innocent-and-we-can-breathe-again/
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