Sunday, May 30, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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A year after the murder of George Floyd, America remains a nation torn by bigotry.
We find ourselves facing withering street-level attacks on Jews and Asians. Police killings of Black Americans continue unabated. Extremist political leaders on the right wage war on being Black in America, including with amplified assaults on voting rights for people of color across the country. Common-sense police reform remains lacking at the federal level. Now comes an angry effort by conservatives to prevent even teaching about race issues and racism in schools.
We have even witnessed some elected officials downplaying slavery itself, trying to convince Americans that the forced bondage of millions of Blacks and the unspeakable horrors they faced weren’t really as bad as history tells us it was.
The unifying thread to these problems? The Republican Party, Fox News and other right-wing media, and state-sponsored agitators from Russia continue to promote any issue that will further divide Americans, frighten white voters and encourage hatred of other Americans right down to the neighborhood level.
For profiteers in extremist media — Fox News’ Rupert Murdoch and his ilk — division is big business. And now it has become apparent that social media’s business model is fueled on hate and conflict as well. These platforms trade in audience engagement, and for thousands of years few things get humans more engaged than ethnic and religious animus.
Meanwhile, right-wing media and social media work hand-in-hand to pump a steady stream of misinformation through the media ecosphere, where it’s shared in echo chambers that encourage Americans to disbelieve legitimate media and make the lies essentially impervious to fact-checking. These forces of propaganda and misinformation have not only driven the nation apart, they’ve separated the right into camps that believe a badly distorted version of reality.
As social media morphs into a 24/7 engine of hate, one must ask when we as a culture say we’ve had enough of all this.
Enough with the conspiracies. Enough with lies. Enough with detached billionaires profiting from racism. Enough dancing slavishly at the end of a hate-filled, Russian-spawned meme.
With the anniversary of Floyd’s killing this past week, we owe it to ourselves, our neighbors, our nation and our planet to resolve to put in the hard work necessary to heal our country, value truth and honestly address the ills of our racial and ethnic divisions.
After Floyd’s killing, millions of Americans across the ethnic spectrum flooded the streets to say “Enough” to systematic racism and police abuses. Their historic demonstrations prompted forward motion on addressing inequalities, including at the federal level with the House-approved George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and in some state legislatures, including Nevada’s. Case in point: Gov. Steve Sisolak’s signing of two bills this past week to limit no-knock warrants and empower the state attorney general’s office to investigate police departments over patterns of civil rights violations.
But as we’re all too well aware, the steps toward progress created panic and terror among the right-wing forces defending the white power structure. The George Floyd Act became mired in the Senate amid Republican opposition. Republican-dominated legislatures in some states passed laws making it a crime to criticize or insult a law enforcement officer, or decreasing protections for the type of social-justice demonstrators we saw last year. Then, of course, was the state-by-state campaign to suppress the vote among Blacks and other Americans of color.
Through it all, right-wing media and social media poisoned minds in support of these hateful actions, and Russian operatives took advantage of the situation to sow discord.
Americans must commit to overcoming these dark forces and putting the nation on a trajectory to fairness and equality.
Meanwhile, it’s essential that any candidate who dreams of running for office in 2022 resolve to stand for the best of American values: truth, open-heartedness, tolerance and inclusivity.
