The Racist Death of an Empire

This past week, we’ve seen yet another man murdered by law enforcement officers’ lethal indifference to the integrity of a person of colour. This past week, we have seen a coronary report trying to justify, mitigate, and defend a law enforcement officer’s lethal indifference to the life and integrity of a person of colour. This past week, we have also seen perhaps the most influential country in the world go up in flames, amidst a global and deadly pandemic, because a law enforcement officer showed lethal indifference to the life and integrity of a person of colour. This past week, we have seen belligerent paramilitary law enforcement arrest affiliated reporters on live TV and fire openly and directly at rolling cameras because a law enforcement officer showed lethal indifference to the life and integrity of a person of colour.

And I don’t think this will be the last we’ll see it. I think this footage is going to be played over and over and over again. Not just on air, not just in court rooms (if we’re that lucky). Not just in infuriated commentary. But in classrooms. By teachers. By anthropologists. In museums and in libraries. Because this echoes the fall of an empire.

The Fractured States of America are sending in the National Guard, Military Police, and threaten to send in the actual Army, to quash the unrest. Another empire on the other side of the Pacific does the same, as China openly declares that it’s getting ready to send its military to terminate Taiwan’s vision of self-determination. In the past, we’ve seen the same. From the British trying to give their colonists a bloody nose and a body count because they disrespected tea. Or the French when their slave island treasure trove refused to subject themselves any further. Or how ’bout the eternal empire, the glorious Rome, and how they sent army after army as their slaves and subjects took a stand and said “you will disgrace us, humiliate us, and murder us no more!”. In every case we have in history, when an empire greets opposition with bloody murder and violence, that spells the death sentence for that empire.

I can’t speak to the pavement lynching of George Floyd. Or the gun-down of Breonna Taylor. Or how Ahmaud Arbery was blasted away on his morning jog by white supremacist vigilantes. Or about any of the many more racially charged tyrannical heresies that the American powers that be have committed before the last two months. I admit, I don’t feel their deaths. I look and behold and am filled with disgust at a morally bankrupt nation, but the outrage isn’t mine. I live in a nation that has enjoyed its privilege for 500 years. And even in a life of professional failure, I live a life of means and relative comfort. The death of George Floyd is abstract to me up in my ivory hovel on the other side of an ocean. That’s a shame, and maybe even disgusting in its own right, but it’s the truth. And even though I’ve worked with the disenfranchised, the hopeless, the angry and the destitute by teaching in isolated and “no-go” neighbourhoods, I am not from there. I haven’t lived their lives. I do not speak for them.

But I can speak to the sheltered little princes, sitting in their American Dreams and watching cities burn on their television sets, fearing that their precious status quo is getting uprooted and upended. I can speak to those for whom the murder of George Floyd isn’t a personal assault, but an unfortunate circumstance best left forgotten like all the others before it…

Fellow Romans! What you see is real! The anger, the feelings of oppression and subjugation, the violent revolt against the systemic disenfranchisement of those that labour the stone. All of it is real. And justified. You have let go of the rudder, left it to baser human beings to keep your families in comfort on the backs of those that you’ve branded as “less important”. They are tired of being trod upon. They are tired of being taken for granted. But more so than tired, they are angry.

A great part of your population has been driven to rampant violence. It is not the first time. It will likely not be the last. Cities will burn, shops will be looted, families will be torn asunder. And even though you, personally, may not have had an active hand in their subjugation, your silence has. You are culpable. They know it. And deep down, you know it. You pushed them into a crossroads, and they chose to stand rather than to prostrate themselves any further.

Now you are at a crossroads. Your cities are burning. Your society, your civic contract, has been neglected for too long and is now being torn asunder; from both sides! So you have, through being complicit or simply apathetic, found yourself at a crossroads. To one side, you decide to make yourself part of the mortar of your burning eternal city. You grab onto everything you’ve taken for granted, hunker down, and drag out the death of your precious, sickly Republic long past its due. Perhaps you even twist it into a morbid autocratic husk of what it once was, just to keep it alive for a few more dying breaths. Elect an emperor. Buckle down. Become part of the problem. Or, on the other hand, you make yourself part of the inevitable change. Make yourself part of the solution, and not the problem. You listen and learn from those that have suffered for your privilege, and you help in making something better out of the ashes.

Yes; your eternal city is eternal. But not so because it will stand unchanged through millennia, but because it is alive. Constantly changing, morphing, growing. Either you pressure it to be static, brittle, and prone to crumbling to pieces only to regrow again. Or you labour to keep it flexible, malleable, able to withstand whatever change is needed of it.

You, fellow Romans, are at a crossroads. Choose.

/Sebastian Lindberg 29/5-2020