Police brutality, mass black incarceration, poor education, redlining of neighborhoods all told a story so routine as to be invisible: A black life is worth less than a white life in America. Not in Atlanta, not anywhere, as Derek Chauvin’s white knee on George Floyd’s black neck demonstrated. Progress on race issues is not resolution of race issues.
When Atlanta hosted the 1996 Olympics, Georgia’s flag was still, in essence, the Confederate flag. African-Americans remained disproportionately poor and vulnerable. Perhaps things were never quite as good as they seemed. If City Hall was the nexus of racial cooperation, the State Capitol was the nexus of segregation now and forever. What became of the dream of Atlanta? It was always a progressive enclave surrounded by reactionary forces. This is where a young black man, Rayshard Brooks, was killed on June 12 by a white police officer. This is the home of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which went AWOL on the virus. Yet now the city is an epicenter of America’s double meltdown: over racial injustice and over the coronavirus that has hit marginalized African-Americans particularly hard. Every Atlanta mayor since 1974 has been black. She wanted my brother and me to open the paper every day and see black people making decisions.” That was the 1970s. James Forman Jr., a Pulitzer-prize winning professor at Yale Law School, and the son of the prominent civil rights activist James Forman Sr., recalled how, at age 12, he moved from New York to Atlanta because “my mother, as a divorced white woman raising black children, wanted us surrounded by black success. The city managed racial conflict through compromise. Birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr., cradle of the civil rights movement, Atlanta, with its gleaming towers and porch swings, was an American exception. ATLANTA - This, an old saying goes, is “the city too busy to hate,” one of the few places in America where enlightened leaders, black and white, chose prosperity over prejudice and a large black middle class emerged decades ago.
0 kommentar(er)
