After the Civil War, white southerners began to fear losing political, social, and economic superiority more than they feared the possibility of physical retaliation by the nation's new citizens. Nearly a century of Jim Crow Lawsprimarily, but not exclusively, in the Southdisenfranchised, segregated, and impoverished former slaves and their descendants. Thousands of lynchings of black people occurred while police, the local militia, looked onor participated.
The 2020 the public murder of a descendant of slaves, George Floyd, by four unapologetic policemen on a city street demonstrated that the specter of James Madison's ideasdespite multiple Constitutional amendments intended to establish and protect the rights of African Americans as fully counted citizensstill looms over black lives in America.
Though a lone, unarmed black man does not conjure up an image of an insurrection, police across the United States behave as if their role remains that of assuaging the fears of white citizens by holding black people in check. Since 1787, much of the racism inherent in the Constitution has been mitigated, but the legacy of that racism and the entitlement it gives to those empowered to enforce the law discloses what it means to be "other" in "a more perfect Union. The video of Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd's neck is an 8'46" documentary on America's 401-year-old attitude toward black Americans.
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