History could look back on the Spring of 2020 and describe its combination of tragedies as a period of unprecedented upheaval in America. But if we as Americans “do the right thing,” the eyes of history might be able to squint just a bit, and one day see this moment in time as the best thing to happen to America in decades.
Make no mistake, the scourge of an invisible killer, political discord about how we govern, and the salting of racial wounds that still bleed will have inked a metaphorical tattoo of the worst kind on our nation’s skin, painful and deep. I contend however, this trifecta of tragedies and their combined impact might very well push America to a place where we can make long-lasting positive change on many fronts. While the Arab Spring described the protests from 2010 to 2012 against authoritarian regimes throughout the Middle East and North Africa, the crisis our nation faces now is uniquely American. It is unique because it has brought into question three qualities that have always set America apart and made us a model to the world. First, COVID-19 has demonstrated, with deadly effect, that America’s unique ability to protect its citizens from external threats is not absolute. Second, during this crisis, traditional standards of American governance have been violated, causing us to question how we govern and sowing the seeds of division when we need unity the most. Finally, America’s so called “melting pot” of racial and ethnic harmony has also been called into question. The pot reached a boiling point with the murder of Blacks in the name of justice, killings that have forced an uncomfortable but necessary conversation on our nation’s racist history and its impact today. As an African American, a retired military Colonel, raised by parents who were victims of the Jim Crow south, I have studied and lived through social inflection points that have galvanized national movements for change both here and abroad. With this perspective, I submit that the symbiotic interplay between COVID-19, atypical American governance, and a racial justice reckoning has culminated in a watershed moment that could lead to lasting change. I have dubbed this crisis and the tipping point it has brought about, the American Spring.
Protecting Americans from COVID-19
All tipping points start with a spark. In the Middle East, it was literally the spark made by a street vendor as he lit himself on fire, dying in protest after being harassed by police for selling oranges without a permit, so began the Arab Spring.i For the American Spring, the spark was COVID-19. The virus set the stage for everything else, breaks in governing norms, intense scrutiny of racial injustice, all of it, either happened because of, or was magnified by, the impact of the virus. By itself however, the virus also laid bare the painful truth that even with America’s geographic distance from other nations and our military and technological might, we can’t adequately defend the country against the most insidious of threats.
Unlike most other countries, we’ve typically been able to beat back external enemies. In fact, threats of an existential nature have rarely even come close to our shores because of geography and our great power. The virus however, has woven into the current crisis a danger we’ve rarely had to contend with as Americans, a threat that attacks along our nation’s fault lines and ruins, or outright claims, the lives of many, especially the least among us. The sick, the elderly, the poor, racial minorities, and the less educated have shouldered the brunt of the ravages of COVID-19. Now, the working class appears to be carrying the burden of resurrecting the economy in restaurants, bars, and stores despite not having an efficient safety net, the healthcare, and proactive health screening they need to do so.
Our medical might in terms of advanced treatments and technology, arguably the best in the world, has not been enough to protect every American. Reliable, fast, and free virus testing, for example, still remains a problem in many areas of our nation. The White House’s source data for its guidelines entitled “Opening up American Again” indicated that even as late as the end of April, countries like Slovakia, Israel, Denmark, and New Zealand were outpacing America in COVID-19 testing per 1,000 people.ii Our industrial capacity turned America into a great power, it helped win world wars. America has also defined the information age with the likes of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, and our military remains the most powerful on the planet, but none of it has provided enough medical armor and lifesaving weapons our troops in the healthcare trenches desperately needed for the war on COVID-19. Although we are still very far from any sort of crippling, the American Spring has been different because the virus has found a way to magnify the cracks in our strength. We can now feel these fissures, and their texture serves as braille to our blindness that although America is indeed great, our greatness is not always enough, so we need to do better.
Racial Injustice
COVID-19 also impacted our lives by creating an environment that would bring an unprecedented level of attention to the topic of racism and the so called American “melting pot.” With so many quarantined because of the virus, our busy American lives were able to dedicate the 8 minutes and 46 seconds required to literally watch the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Mr. Floyd was not the first unarmed Black person murdered by police in America. In fact, at the time of Floyd’s murder, there had been over 123 such cases since 2015, to include the shooting of John Crawford at my local, suburban Wal-Mart.iii What made George Floyd’s murder different was COVID-19; it served as the deadly pause button we needed to fully absorb and appreciate the larger significance of Floyd’s tragic death and the dozens like it that came before. There were no televised sporting events to distract our attention from the greater issues Floyd’s murder symbolized, no multi-racial throngs of athletes holding up championship trophies in unity and broadcast into our living rooms. Instead, it was George Floyd with a knee to his neck, crying out for his mother who had been dead for months. Also, because of COVID-19’s racial component, hitting Blacks much harder in terms of mortality due in part to racial disparities in healthcare, Floyd’s murder was a sort of doubling down on racial inequality.
America has never perfectly blended the multicultural, multi-racial tapestry of people who make up our fabric. In fact, recent weeks have reminded us just how “un-American” we have been, and in many cases continue to be, to those who call our country home, people who help build this nation, people who are the human fuel for our economic engine, and people who have fought and died for this country.
Many Americans however, have been blind to the systemic and institutional racism this country was built upon, a plague of its own that still haunts us today. Cell phone video and police body cameras increasingly capture snippets of today’s racial injustices, but the iconic images of the Civil Rights Movement are gone. There are no evening news videos of Blacks being sprayed with firehoses or attacked with police dogs. Today, Black girls are not seen being escorted to class by the National Guard in Arkansas, or blown to pieces at Sunday School on Birmingham street corners. The blunt reminders of our nation’s original sin have mostly faded, and the advent of Black movie stars, sports champions, and even a Black president have lulled many into a false sense of a post-racial America. In reality, the sin of slavery gave birth to Jim Crow who then fathered a deceptive form of racial bias that put forth a dangerous proposition: slavery and Jim Crow are gone, so everything is fine. The ugly truth however, is that 400 years of discrimination has robbed Blacks of the foundational pillars needed to advance. It stole a quality education and the chance for home ownership to grow wealth. It also ingrained the stigma of Black inferiority deep into the American subconscious. Indeed, the son of Jim Crow was the so called “Black underclass.” While the Marshall Plan was rebuilding a defeated Germany, and General MacArthur was resurrecting Japan’s economy, the cycle of modern underprivilege for many Blacks began and brought with it the institutional underpinnings of systemic racism.
Today, systemic racism manifests itself in a variety of ways and is well documented. The report by the Department of Justice for example, on the Ferguson, Missouri police revealed Black drivers were twice as likely to be stopped and searched but 26% less likely than Whites to be found with contraband.iv A nation-wide study, published in the journal Nature, of nearly100 million traffic stops from 35 municipalities in 21 states revealed the same type of disparity.v For those willing to learn, the statistics are like mile markers to the unfamiliar, but for those of us forced to travel the road of injustice every day, they are signposts on a route we know all too well.
The blue rayon football jacket I was wearing at the time still hangs in my closet as a reminder of my first unwarranted traffic stop by police. It was over 30 years ago but I remember it well. I was home from the Air Force Academy on winter break, and my brother and I wore black skull caps and workout gear as we drove into, and then out of, our neighborhood on our way to the gym. The sheriff’s deputy, who had been parked at the subdivision’s entrance, said he was pulling over any “thing” that looked suspicious after reports of break-ins in the area.
Much is made of “the talk” African American parents have with their children about how to handle these situations. In reality, it is a lifelong conversation, not just one chat. On this day however, I chose to stray away from what I had been taught and I pressed the deputy, asking him what made me look suspicious. I could hear my brother, who was in the passenger seat, quickly suck air between his teeth, creating the reflexive sound you make when you realize something bad just happened. The deputy paused, moved his head around to visually scan the vehicle, and responded by saying I did not have a neighborhood sticker on my car. He then asked why I was in town, after reading my out of state license. My nature is to fight back in these circumstances with intellectual barrages of 4th Amendment protections, county jurisdictional constraints, and probable cause standards for traffic stops. I screamed at the deputy, shouting, “I have the Constitutionally guaranteed right to be in any town in America whenever I want without any damn sticker!” Fortunately, the shouting was only in my mind. My brother was able to almost telepathically convey his unease, and my lifelong training kicked in. I quietly handed the deputy my military ID and politely explained how I was home from the Air Force Academy. He asked for our address, logged our vehicle info, and let us go. Not long after, we could see his patrol car stop in front of our house as we entered our cul-de-sac. This was pre-Google Maps so we assumed he was verifying our address was legitimate.
If racial injustice was an iceberg, the type of harassment we received that day represents what is below the waterline. Murders of unarmed African Americans by police are at the tip. Similar to the Justice Department’s findings on the Ferguson, Missouri police, a Northeastern-Harvard study analyzed two years of shooting deaths by law enforcement and found “AfricanAmericans are at greater risk of being killed by police, even though they are less likely to pose an objective threat to law enforcement.”vi
Tangentially, the murder of Ahmaud Arbery shows bigotry-fueled killings of African Americans in the name of law and order is not limited to the police. With a Confederate flag sticker adorning their truck, three White men chased Arbery for several minutes while he was simply jogging in the neighborhood and then killed him. The killers suspected Arbery of having been one of several people seen on security cameras entering a partially constructed home in the area in the weeks before. The homeowner acknowledged nothing had been stolen or damaged, but Arbery’s killers felt the need for an armed pursuit, and, according to a witness, christened his murder with a shout of “"f***ing n***er" for good measure.vii
While these killings represent the extremes of racial bigotry in America and dominate today’s conversation on race, they sit atop an iceberg of discrimination many experience in their everyday lives. It’s a racial bias that exists “below the water” and is not talked about or reported. From corporate boardrooms where studies show resumes with “non-White” sounding names score lower than identical ones with White names, to the ivory covered halls of academia, or your local Starbucks, the specter of inequality is all around us, even if we as individuals don’t see it.viii
The hope however, has always been that we would eventually, and fully, live up to our nation’s creed that “all are created equal.” Though written on the backs of slaves, the pursuit of this vision has in many ways defined who we are, and made us unlike any other country in the world. Our enormous progress on the path to equality has not been quick enough by the moral standards of the universe, but we’ve set records compared to other countries still pursuing this ideal. As a Black man in America and a veteran, I have marched to protest, and worn the uniform to defend, a country vastly different from when my father marched as a victim of Jim Crow and fought in Vietnam. The change has been dramatic and largely for the better in terms of race and equality, but the American Spring is shouting at us in a way that only American movements can make noise. It is saying we are far from mission complete in this American experiment, and the battle for equality is not yet won.
Atypical American Governance
Once COVID-19 sparked the fire, and acts of racial injustice and subsequent protests fueled the flames, American government had to respond. But instead of aggressively tackling the problems and unifying the country, the collective decisions made at the federal, state, and local levels have compounded the crisis and seem dramatically out of step with traditional standards of American governance. Specifically at issue are the roles each level of government should play in protecting us from COVID-19 and acts of racial injustice by police, and how authorities should react to mass protests.
How we govern has made who we are very different from much of the world. Our journey is not yet finished, but no nation has ever gone from infancy to our level of prosperity and global leadership as fast as America. Much remains to be done to ensure all our citizens benefit fully from the fruits of liberty, but the way in which the American experiment tries to remain grounded in the rule of law, anchored by the freedoms, checks, and balances put forth in our Constitution, is something other countries still aspire to. The way we have governed during this crisis however, has divided us and is the capstone tragedy of the American Spring. Even those who claim strict adherence to historical norms of American jurisprudence have displayed inconsistencies that reveal politically divisive motives.
Local governments for example, have been told it’s up to them to make decisions about protecting us from the virus, only then to be questioned by leaders at the federal level, or even overruled at the state level, for issuing legal protective orders medical experts say will save lives.ix The virus has put the country supposedly on a “war footing” with “wartime leadership,” yet we have not created a federal system to combat the threat. We would never tell Wisconsin for example, to purchase, on its own, enough F-35 fighter jets to defend itself against an aerial attack. Although no American has been killed by a foreign aircraft since 1953, we don’t take any chances, and rightfully so. We defend Green Bay, and every town in the country, with a national armed force, the greatest in world history. For COVID-19 however, a virus that has killed more Americans than the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined, Wisconsin is largely on its own.
The story might be different if the virus was a violent, or even peaceful protester marching for racial justice and equality. One death is too many, but as of early June, only 8 had died in direct relation to protests that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer.x Despite the relatively low number, federal, active duty troops have been called to arms inside our nation’s borders, a step rejected by the most senior civilian and uniformed leaders in our defense department.xi
At the other end of the spectrum, and arguably too extreme, is the concept of restructuring funding for police or even outright abolishing police units. In one case, the city of Seattle chose to abandon a police precinct and virtually cede control of city blocks to a group of protesters who had established an “autonomous zone” complete with its own set of laws dictated by its inhabitants. The Seattle case appears to be an attempt to deescalate a situation that has occurred largely without violence, but the decision by the city to withdraw police seems out of step with our common expectation of maintaining law and order.
One protest incident stands out among the others however, as emblematic of how the interplay between COVID-19, racial injustice, and actions by our government symbiotically fueled the American Spring. In late April, hundreds of protesters, all White and many armed with assault rifles, stormed the Michigan state capitol building to protest the governor’s stay-at-home order. Without wearing COVID protective masks, protesters leaned their heads to within inches of police officers’ faces inside the building and shouted at them. So how did authorities react to armed protestors storming the capitol and confronting police in such a threatening manner? They did nothing. No tear gas, no rubber bullets, and no batons were used. The officers just stood there.xii The response was in stark contrast to the mostly peaceful, racial justice protests around the country that were met with the full range of force from state, local, and federal officers. Most notably, a completely peaceful protest by a multi-racial group near Lafayette Square across from the White House, was attacked by federal officers with stun grenades, chemical irritants, and rubber bullets. The officers charged the crowd, not because protestors had been violent, but to clear the area for the President’s photo op where he held a Bible in front of a nearby church.xiii
The difference in how authorities reacted to mostly peaceful protestors, many of whom were Black, protesting murder, compared to how they responded to an armed invasion of a state capitol by an all-White mob who wanted to get a haircut during a global pandemic, speaks to the heart of what drove the American Spring.
While many of the steps taken to enforce our laws, keep the peace, and fight the virus without a unified federal effort, have been technically legal in the view of many experts, they seem to break with the spirit of historical norms of governance in this country. More broadly, the American Spring has made us question American governance in a manner not seen in decades and with consequences we have yet to fully comprehend.
A Unique Opportunity for Change
Although some of the consequences have been immensely tragic, the American Spring now brings an opportunity that is also uniquely American, the opportunity to change in a way that only America can. The Arab Spring was largely unsuccessful. Despite the protests, authoritarian regimes in the Middle East remain largely unchanged for a variety of reasons. The American Spring however, has a chance to be different. Its trifecta of tragedies from COVID-19, racial injustices, and questionable governance have created an historic inflection point for America and ignited a global dialogue on public health, racism, and governing. In addition to the dialogue, three other factors make this a unique opportunity for lasting change on all three fronts.
First and foremost, what makes this social awakening an unprecedented and uniquely American opportunity for change is the broad-based support for action around the world among people of all races and nationalities. From the White House to Downing Street, people are discussing public health reform beyond COVID-19. Here at home, bipartisan initiatives on police reform and accountability are receiving an unprecedented public airing at all levels of government, and our most senior military leaders have pushed back on the improper use of servicemen and women inside our borders. Most surprisingly to many, protest marches for racial justice include a sea of White faces from around the globe. Salt Lake City, the capital and largest city in Utah, a state consistently ranked in the bottom five in terms of the size of its Black population, has held multiple marches for racial justice attracting thousands of mostly White people. In a bit of historical irony, protestors have toppled statues of everyone from Robert E. Lee in an Alabama school yard, to King Leopold in a Belgium town square, providing images akin to what we might expect in a people’s revolution in a developing country. Like many popular trends born in America, this social awakening has caught fire among a variety of different people worldwide.
Secondly, even the best emotional catalyst for change is made stronger by impartial facts and evidence. Fortunately, our First Amendment freedoms have insured a long tradition of independent investigative analysis and the study of societal problems with results codified and accessible. Disparities in our healthcare system, government maleficence, and systemic racism are not always brought to light, but America is riddled with public and private sector institutions dedicated to documenting societal ills and providing the evidentiary basis to transform. For the virus and public health, various medical journals and associations continue to publish and sponsor independent studies on the most effective protective measures as well as documenting disparities in healthcare in general. Governance is still monitored and reported on by internal “watchdog” agencies, and the checks and balances provided by legislatures and the judiciary at all levels serve as a much-needed guardrail. Finally, systemic racism has long been documented in studies and reports by private and public groups as previously described. The American Spring has provided the requisite emotional catalyst every transformational movement needs, but America also has the receipts.
Finally, we live in a representative democracy, with a non-partisan military sworn to defend the Constitution, and this is an election year. Memories of this moment in time are less likely to fade before we can let our voices be heard at the ballot box. Also, the comparatively longer length of American elections means more dialogue as candidates debate, hold town halls, and are forced to take a stand on the issues at hand. In the coming months, much will be discussed about statues and the names of military bases in honor of men who attacked America and killed more of our citizens than Bin Laden. Heated arguments will occur about kneeling for the Anthem and flags past and present, but real change can occur if the protesters join the kneelers when they stand and march together to polls.
This season of change was brought about by a trifecta of tragedies. COVID-19, discord about how we govern, and the exposure of racial wounds, many thought were healed, have culminated in a historic inflection point for America. Unlike the countries in the Middle East, whose authoritarian regimes forcefully used their illiberal levers of power to beat back their Spring of change, our country is armed with the weapons of a diverse democracy to bring about genuine reform. If we take advantage of the bipartisan, multi-racial consensus for action, lean on the documented analysis of what we face, and harness the power of our vote, we might one day look back and say, despite the costs, we are better because of the American Spring.
i Hassan, A. (2014, December 17). A Fruit Vendor Whose Death Led to a Revolution. Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/us/arab-spring-a-fruit-vendor-who-started-a-revolution.html
ii Opening Up America. The White House, 2020, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Testing-Overview-Final.pdf. Accessed 27 June 2020; Ritchie, R. (n.d.). Coronavirus (COVID-19) Testing - Statistics and Research. Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing
iii Fatal Force: Police shootings database. (2020, January 22). Retrieved June 27, 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/
iv Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. The U.S. Department of Justice, 2015, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf. Accessed on 27 June 2020.
v Pierson, E., et al., (2020, May 04). A Large-scale Analysis of Racial Disparities in Police Stops Across The United States. Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1
vi C. Barber, D., Lord, V., Miller, L., Smith, B., J. Nix, B., White, M., . . . Forum, P. (1970, January 01). A Typology of Civilians Shot and Killed by US Police: A Latent Class Analysis of Firearm Legal Intervention Homicide in the 2014–2015 National Violent Death Reporting System. Retrieved August 16, 2020, from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11524-020-00430-0; Thomsen, I. (2020, April 16). 1,000 people in the US die every year in police shootings. Who are they? Retrieved August 16, 2020, from https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/04/16/000-people-in-the-us-are-killed-every-year-inpolice-shootings-how-many-are-preventable/
vii Fausset, R. (2020, June 05). Judge Finds Probable Cause for Murder Charges in Arbery Case. Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/us/ahmaud-arbery-murder-hearing.html
viii Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2003, July 28). Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination. Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
ix Graham, D. (2020, June 19). Governors Are Passing the Coronavirus Buck to Mayors. Retrieved August 16, 2020, from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/covid-preemption-reversals/613210/
x Dunn, A. (2020, June 18). Fact check: More Black people died in 2019 police shootings than in George Floyd protests. Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/18/fact-check-more-black-people-killed-police-than-floyd-protests/5323116002/
xi Secretary of Defense Esper Addresses Reporters Regarding Civil Unrest. (n.d.). Retrieved August 16, 2020, from https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/2206685/secretary-of-defense-esper-addresses-reporters-regarding-civil-unrest/
xii Mauger, C. (2020, May 01). Protesters, some armed, enter Michigan Capitol in rally against COVID-19 limits. Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/04/30/protesters-gathering-outside-capitol-amid-covid-19-restrictions/3054911001/
xiii Aaron Davis, C. (2020, June 14). Officials familiar with Lafayette Square confrontation challenge Trump administration claim of what drove aggressive expulsion of protesters. Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/officials-challenge-trump-administration-claim-of-what-drove-aggressive-expulsion-of-lafayette-square-protesters/2020/06/14/f2177e1e-acd4-11ea-a9d9-a81c1a491c52_story.html
