on reality and revelation: for George Floyd

“He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” — Isaiah 53.3

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” — James Baldwin

I do not have a right to feel any of the things that I feel — the seasickness, the liquid rage. It is like being full of stolen tears. This is no ambiguous white guilt or generalized self-loathing, more a statement of fact. I saw the video before I even fully knew what I was watching — a black man wheezing, grasping, treated worse than an animal. Like most such displays aired over our devices in recent years, it happened in broad daylight. Unlike any other I can recall, a crowd of onlookers is literally begging for the murder to stop, verbally sparring with the stone-faced, dead-eyed cop whose knee digs into the windpipe of a suffocating George Floyd. There are no signs of distress, threat, hesitation, no rash or momentary response — only icy indifference, the callous stare of death.

I do not know the line between being informed and being a voyeur. There is no more intimate experience than death, and no humans are built to metabolize regular public executions. And yet I experience all of the horror in the third person, because the little screen walls me off from the terror of a man begging for his mother and for his life, as if a murder were an exhibition in a zoo. I am walled off not only by my screen, but by a history that does not encode racial trauma into every cell of my body. To experience all of it behind so many walls, and yet to feel such a mutiny in my body, to feel all faculties of mind and body shut down, makes me feel weak… Jesus.

I am a voyeur, too, watching Amy Cooper’s faux-hysterics, calling the cops to report her life was in danger from an “African-American,” feeling threatened by a birdwatching black man who had the audacity to ask her to put her dog on the leash. I borrow incredulity, move from nervous laughter to contempt — again behind the safe confines of my screen, as the two events bookend the day in a kind of perverse poetry enacted on a national stage. It reminds me of what a former colleague said derisively to me in 2016, flashing a mouth full of teeth, when I would talk about the explicit racism in the Trump campaign, “You know, Jonathan, a lot of that is only theater.”

Only theater. My love goes into the CVS a few days ago, and is in line to check out, when the middle-aged white couple in front of her berates the young black girl behind the counter for wearing a mask: scoffing, mocking, condescending. When she politely replies that “we’re just trying to keep everybody safe, and actually this is our company policy, we are required to wear these,” the lady — Ruby Turpin incarnate from Flannery O’Conner’s short story “Revelation” — only gets more combative. She tells her she needs to learn to think for herself, speak up for herself, lectures her. So Nicole, flushed with anger, jumps in to challenge her, and the theater of Facebook is now performed on the well-worn, thin carpet of the drugstore. Ruby Turpin’s doppelgänger fires back, before her husband gets more squeamish, acts embarrassed, starts shooing her out the door. As the door opens, she is literally chanting, “TRUMP FOREVER! TRUMP FOREVER!”

Only theater. I know Shakespeare said “all the world is a stage, and the men and women merely players,” but Shakespeare could not have envisioned a time in which all of reality is as overtly performative as this. Because murders on a screen, to our brains are like anything else on a screen. There is not even a click like when we changed the stations on the remote, a soundless shift into another reality. If the sharp edges of the real accidentally penetrates reality, you can rapidly choose another.

Only theater, judging riots like movie reviews, remote control in one hand and a beer in another, objectively pontificating — in that bland culture-free that whiteness always presumes — what is and what is an appropriate display of rage. It’s time to change the channel, but there’s a glitch in the matrix now — reality flashes and flickers, disrupting. And you can feel the unease in your belly, but relief, sweet relief, is only a silent click away, back to the Roman circus. Executions are not really entertaining, self-examination even less so. What do we have to lull the people back into a highway stare today? Cut to a scene where Joe Biden wears a mask, and the President makes fun of him for it. And 45 is tweeting not about the actual death of a man in broad daylight, but spreading speculative conspiracy theories about the death of Joe Scarborough’s former intern. He is talking about the potential of mail-in ballot fraud, and twitter is fact-checking him, and he’s going to make an executive order against social media companies, and…I guess really nothing that happens to a black man on the street is as bad as Democrats giddily shredding babies, and…FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST, THANK GOD ALMIGHTY I’M FREE AT LAST. Duty-free again, guilt-free again, ambiguity free again.

After all, who knows what to believe, when the news isn’t something you know…but something you get off too. George Floyd, wheezing, a big man, begging for mercy, a small crowd of onlookers pleading, cussing, filming — but God, like big George, is silent — he opens not his mouth. I can’t believe my eyes, my very own eyes. Like Ahmaud, it’s all there in broad daylight, in the middle of the day. But these same little eyes, narrow and a bit bloodshot now, stay glued to the same little screen, that offers alternative realities every time you pick it up. It’s all so overwhelming, isn’t it? Surely a little truth in all of them, a little false in all of them — who knows what you can trust in this day and age anymore? As the film reel continues to flick and flicker in your mind, the black man laying prostrate on the altar of cement does not haunt quite the same way, nor do the hollow eyes of the cop with his knee on his neck. So you say a prayer to the god who’s face is contorted, like George...but there is still no audible reply, from the asphyxiated Christ.

Which probably means it’s fine to keep going as we were before. Eyes are strained, but you’re not sleeping — you are once again the special guest on the game show called Choose your Reality, and when it becomes too intense, too confusing, too overwhelming, you do not need to be anxious or even phone a friend…all you need to do is, scroll on to the next one.

Thank God, though, nearly everyone acknowledges that this last one is actually really bad. Exoneration! And yes, what a massive leap forward it is that mainstream America can have more or less a consensus, that killing an already helpless man in the middle of the street is…less than ideal, as is the murder of a jogger in broad daylight. We have the moral imagination to consider, that public lynchings are not for the common good, and are willing to engage in performative condemnations of these acts.

But what is at stake now is nothing less than reality itself — who dictates it, how, where, and by what means. Almost no one with a pulse seems willing to condone the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery, the flagrant front-door racism of a “Karen” in Central Park, or the public execution of a black man in front of a crowd of people begging for his life — accused of (checks notes), spending a $10 bill. Anecdotally, these “isolated incidents” are nearly universally condemned as wrong. If however you put incidents together as part of a larger narrative, you will of course be judged as “taking a side” and — this is not altogether unfair, since narratives are decidedly not neutral.

Isaiah 53:1 says, “Who has believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” I grew up in church singing a song where the refrain was, “Who’s report, will you believe?” And indeed it seems like such a time, in which we must decide who’s report we will believe. I understand that the stakes are high in this. I also understand that it is highly insulting to a large swath of people who do not endorse public lynchings, to suggest that their politics either directly or indirectly, underwrite such atrocities. I know that you are just trying to live your life, figure it out, do the best you can, and that you, like most people, are chock full of good intentions. I know that you cannot imagine yourself or your friends, consciously choosing to support a structure or system of evil, oppression or injustice, and that it feels haughty, unfair and perhaps outright mean for anyone to suggest otherwise. I know.

But in the age of Trump, here is one problem, among many: when you are being constantly bombarded by competing, conflicting narratives, a paralysis sets in, a kind of dystopian despair that says “nothing really matters.” Because in the midst of constant conflicting truth claims and disinformation, it genuinely does feel impossible to discern truth from lies. So much so that you can’t believe your own eyes anymore, you can’t trust reality when it assaults you. What you get into and what you get off on, is all part of the same endless cycle of competing “facts” — who can know? How can we we know? The truth itself, it seems, is slippery.

Whoever we are or whatever we come from, perhaps there is one last sentence we might get a consensus on: it is not news. It is not news for one people, because it has been part of everyday lived experience for centuries; and not news for another, because no matter how many black and brown bodies are sacrificed or how, whatever is done or will done to them will never be “the news” of what’s really happening in the alternative reality they have created.

While I do not claim the rights to first-person grief, I will not pretend I cannot understand what words mean, or that things that actually do connect don’t light up in my mind. I happen to remember when Colin Kaepernick knelt down in peaceful protest of murders precisely like these, the President said, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’” I remember that neo-nazis that took the life of Heather Heyer and peaceful protestors in Charlottesville were both referred to as “very fine people on both sides.” I saw the footage of armed militias entering a state capitol a few weeks ago, treated with no more surprise or reactionary disdain as if they had come to serve hot tea, and they were referred to as “very good people.” And I saw protestors in Minneapolis last night doused with tear gas.

At this point, you have me figured out: it’s the liberal agenda, he must want people to become Democrats. I am sorry to say that I lack enthusiasm for the contemporary Democratic party, not because it is liberal, but because it is so bourgeois as to somehow manage to insulate itself both from any kind of real, radical economic critique, and any sort of thoroughgoing racial critique as well, which in the era of Trump is really quite an accomplishment. I am not enthusiastic about the Democratic party, not because I am part of a clandestine conspiracy like you see in a Nicolas Cage movie, but because the party is far too clumsy, disorganized and inept to pull off conspiracies. I am cynical that a group of people who’s constructive alternative to brazen corporate bailouts in the midst of a pandemic, is slightly less corporate bailouts, could possibly have the moral imagination to save us.

Alas, if I truly tip my hand — I believe that America as an empire is well on it’s way toward the end, on it’s own “farewell tour” in Chris Hedges’ phrase, and have little real serious hope that the American project can be redeemed at all. Yet I am still holding on to this peculiar claim of being Christian, which means I am liberated from any pragmatic concerns whatsoever, and am thus putting my weight down only on a primitive notion, of bearing witness. My faith, given it’s macabre cross at the center, frees me from the need to argue for what will work, and to cling to what is wooden, and true.

And in my years of being a follower of Jesus in the place known on the map as America, I have found the most consistent, truthful witnesses in the black church. I have found the truth that sets us free among people of color, who have found God where Jesus and the prophets clearly told us that the truth could only be found — on the underside. I am ambiguous about my own experiences, and my ability to discern the truth behind the veil of the screen — but I trust the consistent witness, of a people who have been in a 450-year struggle against the principality of white supremacy. I trust the firsthand accounts of my friends, formed by the Word and forged in the same fire that raged against the Son of Love. I believe their reports, and I believe the report of the God they have shown to me.

I believe that God was not, in fact, indifferent to the cries of George Floyd as he cried for his mother. That God, by the Spirit, was in him, crying out to us, and in him, I saw “the new pattern of an old idea — the Spirit and the Word.” (Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye) You have perhaps glimpsed this reality, this “revelation of the real.” To believe that this story is part of a larger story, is to put your weight down on a narrative, that will likely unhinge everything, that will require you to exchange all of your assumptions.

Dare you trust it? Dare you make the leap, from momentary reaction, into the chasm that is revelation?