The Making of A Great America Uprooting the Spirit of Racism

This is an excerpt from the chapter entitled "White People We Need Your Help":

Shortly after George Floyd’s death, the president made comments along the lines that 99.9% of police officers are good and that we just have a “few bad apples.” Arguably the most powerful white man in the world told an America led predominantly by white people that we don’t have a problem. The direct conclusion from his remarks is that since we don’t have a problem, then there shouldn’t be any protests, peaceful or otherwise. We know that is how the president viewed it as he used the National Guard, tear gas, and rubber bullets to disperse peaceful protesters for an unscheduled photo opportunity shortly after.

How do I, in a short book, show white America that what the president says isn’t true? How does a black man not only contradict the most powerful white man on earth, the leader of a predominantly white nation but go on to convince his white counterparts that the president is wrong? That is the challenge of this book.

I had a discussion with a white woman recently online about a new incident of the police’s abuse of force in Aurora, Colorado, that took place on August 3rd, 2020. I will share that conversation in a moment, but here’s the backstory. In this incident, the police somehow ran the license tags of a woman’s SUV, and the tags wrongly indicated that the vehicle was stolen. The vehicle was flagged as stolen due to a glitch in the system. There was a stolen motorcycle with the same tag number but in a different state. Somehow the system didn’t distinguish between a motorcycle and an SUV. To complicate matters further, the woman had previously reported the vehicle stolen, and it was apparently recovered the next day.

I don’t know why the police ran the woman’s tags. She was in a nail shop with four minor children. How do you think the police confronted the unarmed woman and the four minor children, in a post-George Floyd environment, rid of the “bad apples” where 99.9% of all police officers are good? It’s hard to imagine what ensued.

Four armed officers approached the unarmed woman with weapons drawn and handcuffed her and two of the minor children and made the children lay face down, handcuffed on the ground. Imagine watching your 12-year-old sister and your six-year-old son being handcuffed and placed face down on the ground. Imagine the confusion of the other two minor children, too young to be handcuffed but also made to lay face down on the ground. Add to that visual the sound of children who are confused, afraid, and crying surrounded by police. I watched the video, and I had to fight tears of anger and bewilderment.