‘Plantations’ and police: It’s time to stop living in ‘plantations’ | Opinion

Many would like the past to stay in the past, but despite our best efforts, the past always insinuates itself into the present, forcing us to confront things that can make us excruciatingly uncomfortable.

When George Floyd, a Black man, expelled his heart-wrenching, final words, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” I believe most of us felt a deep, unforgettable sense of horror.

Watching a human being literally have life squeezed out of him instantly stripped away the socially-constructed barriers that we’ve erected to keep us apart. For one painful moment, we were simply part of the human community, and his pain was ours. For one painful moment, when George Floyd stopped breathing, we stopped breathing too — for just a moment.

Barely audible, those three words, “I can’t breathe,” exploded into the ether, igniting protests against social and racial and economic injustice in America, and around the globe.

George Floyd could not know that his death was a beginning, not an end.

It was the beginning of a seismic movement that is forcing Americans to open their eyes; to end a kind of inter-generational narcolepsy that has allowed them to not see the deep well of systemic racial oppression, and social injustice and police brutality that has created and sustains two unequal Americas — one black and one white; a system that has been described as American Apartheid.

George Floyd could not know that his death would drag the ugliest parts of America’s past into the present, and force Americans to stare into the face of America’s racist history; to link the modern iteration of racialized police brutality to patterns of racialized social control in America’s slave past.

Before emancipation, slave patrols, and slave-catching militias brutally policed enslaved people. After emancipation, policing evolved and became more formalized, and American racism became more deeply rooted. We know this because the police enforced Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, and legalized oppression.

George Floyd’s death expressed the collective pain of generations of Black men and Black women and Black children in America, and we know that we cannot un-do the past; we cannot un-see the atrocities. However, we can work hard, very hard to un-learn racism.

One way to begin is by not celebrating vestiges of American racism in the form of statues or monuments, or concepts that surreptitiously invoke human oppression. We can move statues and monuments to museum settings. We can choose to not celebrate romanticized notions of plantations, the forced labor camps that trafficked in human atrocity while hiding behind a veil of gentility.

We can acknowledge that plantations existed in the past. We can acknowledge that in the past, plantations dehumanized the captives and desiccated the morality of the captors, however, it’s time to stop living in them.

Gloria Holmes of Hilton Head Island is a professor emerita at the School of Education at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., an adjunct at the University of South Carolina, and author of “Justice in Search of Leaders: A Handbook for Equity-Driven School Leadership.”