The best and worst of our communities on display

By DAVID NAHAN

I saw the best and worst of our local communities last week.

The best was the protest. The few hundred people who gathered for a Black Lives Matter march in Somers Point walked the two miles across the Route 52 causeway and gathered peacefully in front of the Ocean City Police Department.

It was a crowd of different races and ages protesting a white police officer’s public murder of George Floyd, a black man, in Minneapolis a week earlier, and demanding an end to the unending string of killings, by police, of black men and women for grievances as petty as selling loose cigarettes on a street corner or sitting in a car. Other peaceful Black Lives Matter protests have taken place in Cape May County.

The worst, collectively, was all the hatred over social media in advance of the protest, exposing the way racism in America has never released its deadly grip.

There are good people among us.

There are racists among us, though it is a good bet many would vow they don’t have a prejudiced bone in their bodies. Such is the level of disassociation among too many white people who profess to have religious faith and claim to be good at heart. They believe if they are not shouting specific epithets or refusing to serve a person of color, that they can’t be racists. But they are. 

They are letting hatred overpower them because they refuse to stand up, to speak out and help shift the levels of power to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice, as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called for more than a half-century ago.

Ocean City, like many places across the U.S., honors Dr. King each year.

Those who truly honor his legacy were participating in the march.

Those who dishonor him and what he gave his life for were on display on social media. Many of those posting feared a dangerous mob on the streets, not conceiving that they are more dangerous. They are a lynch-mob at the ready hiding behind keyboards and mobile phones. They comprise a mob more destructive to the fabric of a moral society than the rioters and looters who burn and destroy because this 21st century version enables an unjust system, an unjust society.

I was a child during the Civil Rights Movement, a time of upheaval that gave me hope, but now that I am 60 years old, I am more dismayed than ever.

I am at the tail end of the baby boomer generation, a generation that was supposed to change the world for the better. Instead, it sold out and let the same hatred, born at the birth of this nation, fester.

I was proud of Gov. Phil Murphy on Monday, June 1, when he said the phrase “Black Lives Matter” and refused to equivocate. Politicians usually fall back and add “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter,” phrases that show ignorance or divisiveness or both.

When even well-meaning people say “all lives matter,” they demean the Black Lives Matter movement that began after more unnecessary deaths of black men at the hands of police. They fail to grasp that Black Lives Matter has an unseen “too” tacked onto the end.

Black Lives Matter Too.

Throughout this nation’s history, black lives have been seen as less valuable, less worthy, less important than white lives. The proof has been unending prejudice from the days of legal slavery, through Jim Crow, through unequal opportunities in housing, employment and education (and on and on and on) that continue today. The hidden roots of inequality, even when unseen, strangle opportunity.

The movement demands that black lives matter as much as white lives. That balance wasn’t achieved after the Civil Rights Movement 60 years ago and we’re still not there.

As for “blue lives matter,” that is an intentionally divisive statement because it shows direct contempt for the Black Lives Matter movement and continues the “us versus them” mentality that has poisoned policing across this nation across its history.

There are other ways to show love and respect for law enforcement officers without taking sides. As I’ve written in the past, there is no reason we cannot hold two thoughts in our heads and hearts simultaneously. We can pray that every police officer returns home safe from his or her shift every night after protecting the community while simultaneously praying that every black son or daughter makes it home safely as well, that they don’t have to die needlessly at the hands of police because of implicit bias.

Citizens, not just police, refuse to acknowledge their biases and prejudices.

That was clear from the racist posts I saw on social media preceding the protest march from Somers Point to Ocean City.

It was clear. It was direct. And coming from within our communities. 

We should praise the protesters for showing solidarity to a righteous cause, but that falls short if we fail to contend with the racism that lives among and inside us as well.

Prejudice and racism are not limited to America or to any period of time. They exist throughout cultures around the world. We don’t have a lock on that. We just have our own unique brand that began with the embrace of slavery to build this nation.

We are supposed to be better than that.

America is supposed to be better than that.

Although the original documents founding this nation were not inclusive, we understand them now to mean that all people are equal with all the same inalienable rights.

But we’re not there. Not even close.

David Nahan is editor and publisher of the Ocean City Sentinel, Cape May Star and Wave, Upper Township Sentinel and The Sentinel of Somers Point, Linwood and Northfield.