Modern-day lynchings

As Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson wrote recently, I want to believe that George Floyd’s murderer will be found guilty and sent straight to prison. But we have seen far too many spectacles of Black death that have gone unpunished to naively hold on to that hope. For generations, public lynchings of Black people were considered entertainment. In today’s world, the lynch rope, hangman’s noose is now the Glock 19 or the Smith & Wesson, in the hands of uniformed police officers in positions of power. Far too often, they are White-supremacist police officers who have been allowed to continue to unleash a reign of terror on Black communities all over the country. All because they know full well that they have the support of the so-called “blue code” or “wall of silence”. And in rare cases when a police officer is charged, one rogue juror of a similar racist mindset is all that is needed to eliminate any chance of a ‘guilty’ verdict.