David Bolling: Our Humanity Depends on Everyone’s Humanity

When Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for nine and-a-half minutes in 2020, while Floyd gradually died from asphyxiation – plainly gasping that he couldn’t breathe – America felt a modest seismic shift in its relationship with its own racial history.

Part of that shift was expressed in riots that shook the nation, unleashing rage at police brutality and a broader, inchoate unease that in the 157 years since the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, we were still stuck in the shadows of our slave-holding past.

But as rioting cities burned and some people demanded we “defund the police,” another reaction was taking shape around the feeling that enough was enough, none of us participated in slavery, one rogue police officer does not a pattern of abuse make, and wasn’t George Floyd high on something anyway?

Attached to that emerging wave of resistance to blanket condemnations of police behavior was a refueled anger against affirmative action, against providing a perceived advantage to job candidates because they were Black or brown or even just female.

Meanwhile, a growing number of men – still emotionally, traditionally and, who knows, maybe genetically handcuffed to their historic family beliefs that men should rule the roost while women should cook and bear the children, began metaphorically making guttural noises about manliness, about the emasculation of male power by liberal apologists, and the need to reassert strength and leadership as did our forefathers who built this country.

And in the cauldron of that bubbling political, philosophical, religious and self-affirming stew, two divergent streams of action and belief were born, or at least refueled and propelled into the public commons.

One stream congealed into a more organized, articulate and almost codified belief that there were values in the fabric of America – equality, freedom of belief and of speech, and the value of a diverse variety of traditions, that needed clearer definition, demonstration and support. That stream came to be called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, (DEI) and you have to agree that it was smart no one thought it should be called Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE), right?

The DEI movement was incredibly successful, in that it quickly began to be incorporated (should we say “integrated”?) into the political, corporate, academic and even legal infrastructure of the country. And the more that happened, the more a seething reaction evolved, insisting that DEI reduced the rights of the majority, that teaching children that democracy, religion, nationality, even gender, can be porous, imprecise constructs and concepts, and that we don’t all fit neatly or appropriately into the majority view of reality, ultimately represents a threat to the integrity and survival of family and society.

Meanwhile, lost in the fracas over reassertion of male rights, and the insistence that DEI disenfranchises Christian, conservative and educational perquisites, was (and is) the very real refusal to acknowledge the true nature of America’s history, literally built on the backs of slave labor, built with the willing participation of white citizens in the process of chattel slavery, meaning that fellow human beings could be owned, bought and sold, punished, raped and deprived of any semblance of personal liberty.

Many of us do not seem to be willing to come fully and honestly into the embrace of this reality. We prefer to keep it at a comfortable distance. None of us, we insist, are responsible. We did not own slaves, we did not abuse enslaved people. That history is not our responsibility.

But that is our great, singular mistake. Because all of white America continues to benefit from the free labor of Black slaves on which the wealth of America was built. The legacy of that labor is manifest in the farms and cities and factories that made our forebears comfortable, successful and often rich. For multiple generations black families were refused the opportunity for equal access to the real estate wealth white Americans took for granted.

Bryan Stevenson is a brilliant Black attorney, writer, thinker and leader who has written, and repeatedly insists to public audiences, that “the opposite of poverty is not wealth, it is justice.”

Stevenson believes, “We have a hard time talking about race, and I believe it’s because we are unwilling to commit ourselves to a process of truth and reconciliation…Our identity is at risk when we really don’t care about these difficult things, the positive, wonderful things are nevertheless complicated. We can’t be fully human unless we pay attention to suffering, to poverty, exclusion, to unfairness, to injustice. Our humanity depends on everyone’s humanity.”

Welcome to DEI.