That’s IT! I have “racial battle fatigue.” Just not in the way that Professor Monnica (sic) Williams of the University of Ottawa means it. I am fatigued by people who have never met me calling me a racist because I am white. I am fatigued by media that unfailingly and fawningly spreads that sort of horse manure, the better to signal their virtue to a debased mob.
I am fatigued by people destroying property public and private in an orgy of violence to protest an ugly act by police. Property, I might add, which usually has little to do with the initiating act. I am fatigued by those who claim to be better and more intelligent than the rest of us, who continuously seek to justify and rationalize this sort of disjuntive thinking.
I am fatigued by the needless and tragic death of a person at the hands of authorities being seen only as a license to loot and burn. Murder committed by a policeman does not mean that theft of private property is justified; the untimely death of George Floyd doesn’t give anyone the right to break into a Target store and steal flat-screen televisions.
Mr. Floyd’s tragic death at the hands of former Minneapolis cop Derik Chauvin and his three associates is just that: a tragedy. But do not forget: the murder was done not by me, or thee, or any person other than Chauvin, now appropriately under arrest for murder. And possibly, his three fellow-officers, who apparently saw nothing reprehensible about what was being done. To say otherwise is not only to alienate those who might otherwise be allies in the necessary work of knitting up wounds like these, that the nation may survive; it is to actively seek to thwart and destroy any such effort, that profit made be reaped from race hatred.
To do as is being done nightly in Minneapolis now only distracts from the near-universal revulsion toward the death of George Floyd, and provides an easy excuse for those of all stripes who wish to profit by the event and its aftermath, through the creation of radically different and dangerously divisive narratives. And if that observation annoys you, it should. The truth of it annoys me.
Call it “racial battle fatigue.” And stop it.
