Commentary by Charita Goshay
I’ve long known that no matter what I write, some of you are going to be mad about it.
That’s fine. So long as you aren’t ambivalent about what’s happening to the country we both love.
The events roiling and shaking us to our core may have been ignited by the death of George Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers, but the problems have been festering since 1619.
Those demanding justice are contending this latest deadly encounter is not an aberration, but rather a burdensome norm for Americans of color.
If people didn’t love America, by the way, they wouldn’t be protesting to make a great nation even better.
Now, this shouldn’t have to be said, but there can’t be any wiggle room: Wanton acts of thievery and violence under the guise of protesting are indefensible. It only hands an excuse to people who don’t want to hear about the issue in the first place.
It’s about an unequal application of justice which results in being choked to death for selling cigarettes or trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.
It’s about a 19-year-old white supremacist illegally acquiring a firearm, then using it to kill nine Americans in a church, and living to tell about it.
It’s about Tamir Rice not being allowed to live to tell how, when he was a kid, he once made a childish mistake.
It’s about James Holmes spraying a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., with bullets, then booby-trapping his apartment to kill police, and living to tell about it.
It’s about Trayvon Martin, dying for the sin of being a mouthy teenager.
It’s about Sandra Bland, being arrested during a traffic violation, and not living to fight it.
It’s about Philando Castille following a police officer’s instructions to the letter, and still not coming out alive to tell the tale.
It’s about Breonna Taylor, a first-responder in Louisville, Ky., dying in a hail of bullets because of a no-knock raid at the wrong address.
It’s about Black Lives Matter being labeled as terrorists, but not the white supremacist groups who have terrorized Americans of all races with impunity for 150 years.
It’s about the conspiracy of silence embraced by good police officers who are just trying to get home in one piece but who are protecting the unfit in their ranks.
It’s about how too many departments have moved away from community policing and toward militarization.
It’s about accountability and the need to reform, improve and standardize how policing is practiced, something that only can benefit everyone.
It’s about two Americas, one growing poorer and sicker, and the other, growing richer and richer.
It’s about the abject silence of white evangelicals and the absence of righteous anger which seems to be reserved for self-pity and those whom they support at the ballot box.
It’s about jogging while black, working while black, bird-watching while black, and how the presumption of criminality and guilt grinds away at one’s soul like water wearing down stone.
It’s about whether a great country can summon the will, the vision, and the courage to live up to its own creed as a nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
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Charita M. Goshay is a native of Canton. She is a graduate of Timken High School and Kent State University, where she majored in Communications. Goshay has been employed at the Canton Repository since 1990. Her duties have included in-house librarian, editorial assistant, and staff writer. Her areas of coverage have included Jackson Township, medicine, religion, and general assignment. Goshay, a nationally syndicated columnist at Gatehouse News Servicem is a member of the Repository editorial board. She is a seven-time Associated Press Best Columnist in Ohio and has earned recognition from the Stark Bar Association, the Greater Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, Ohio Legislature, Canton City Schools, Boy Scouts of America, Buckeye Council, and others. A founding board member of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Stark and Carroll Counties, Goshay is also a graduate of Leadership of Stark County.
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