What Is Going On in America? “The End Is Coming!”

The country has erupted into warfare. Weeks before the contentious political presidential conventions are due to begin in Cleveland and Philadelphia and as the summer days heat up, police have murdered two black men without cause but with stunningly revealing video in incidents that turned deadly in Baton Rouge and Minnesota.

The first in Baton Rouge was the killing of Alton Sterling, a black father of five who was selling CDs outside a convenience store with the consent of the store’s owner and showed his licensed gun to a homeless man who had been annoying Sterling. The homeless man called police, who responded by shooting Sterling although he was not resisting nor attempting to use his weapon. The shooting was captured on at least two different video cameras including that of a bystander as two burly white officers wrestled Sterling to the ground and shot him several times.

The second murder of an innocent black man was the killing of Philando “Phil” Castile, a school lunchroom supervisor, in his car in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, following a traffic stop for a broken tail light (“which wasn’t broken”). His fiancée Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds live-streamed the aftermath of the shooting to Facebook from the passenger seat of the vehicle, demonstrating uncanny narrative sang-froid as Castile lay bloodied and dying on the driver’s seat next to her, with Reynolds’ frightened four-year-old daughter observing from the back seat. Castile had been reaching for his driver’s license after informing the officers who stopped him that he had a concealed carry permit and was armed. Notwithstanding this peaceable prelude, one of the white police officers who stopped Castile shot four times through the open window of his vehicle. Castile had no felony criminal record although he had accumulated a number of minor traffic violations.

In response, twelve Dallas police officers and two civilians were gunned down last night in an ambush and subsequent exchange of gunfire during a peaceful protest rally, five of the officers being shot dead by a “sniper” who was perched atop at least one “elevated position.” That assailant, Army reservist Micah Xavier Johnson—who had served a tour of duty in Afghanistan—is also dead, killed by a police robot bomb that was detonated near him by authorities after a three-hour standoff.

As that shooter had indicated to a Dallas police negotiator, ”The end is coming!”

When Johnson’s residence was searched, it was found to contain weapons, explosives, and a computer indicating that black power web sites had been consulted. Three other suspects who were present at the Dallas rally protesting violence by police were briefly taken into custody but were not charged.

Visions of the 1963 sniper murder by rifle of President John F. Kennedy—which made Dallas infamous—crowd into the consciousness of a generation that was stunned when JFK was gunned down during a motorcade on a bright sunny day in November.

But current events are both less momentous and significantly more troubling than an historic presidential assassination, and have morphed into open race warfare (following years of what black observers consider to be unheralded covert race warfare by mostly white police against African-Americans ranging from ubiquitous unwarranted police stops of unarmed men of color to outright police killings of African-American and Latino men).

The events have been unfolding against a backdrop of a jingoistic presidential campaign that has featured storm trooper-like rallies with all the trappings of a Nazi spectacle. And a major candidate, Donald Trump, who obscures and denies any similar motivations—although his words and actions flowing nightly from our television sets clearly indicate otherwise—has been screaming accusations and promises to his audience nightly as his face distorts in impotent fury. White power web sites inflame and are inflamed, and anyone with a sense of history cringes as brutal events unfold one after another.

“Black Lives Matter” chant protestors across the country, a cry that began in August 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, when unarmed black 19-year-old Michael Brown was shot twelve times during a confrontation and killed by a white police officer, whom a subsequent grand jury failed to indict. Witnesses reported the young man holding up his hands or otherwise making various gestures with his hands, even pleading ”Don’t shoot!” which became a national rallying cry. A Missouri grand jury sifted through a variety of conflicting accounts before failing to conclude that the police officer was wholly without cause to fear for his life and defend himself.

The city of Ferguson was eventually found by a federal investigation to have become a catalyst for unwarranted police actions by the mostly white police force against the nearly all-black population. Weeks of demonstrations with looting, violence, and destruction of local businesses by arson followed the shooting and polarizing lack of grand jury indictment, accompanied by police responses that included the use of tear gas and rubber bullets. Confrontations between protesters and law enforcement officers continued for months following the Michael Brown shooting.

A subsequent federal investigative report described a city that “used its police and courts as moneymaking ventures, a place where officers stopped and handcuffed people without probable cause, hurled racial slurs, used stun guns without provocation, and treated anyone as suspicious merely for questioning police tactics” [Q&A “What Happened in Ferguson,” The New York Times]. The Ferguson police chief resigned soon after that report was issued. 

Other similar incidents involving the deaths of black men at the hands of white police officers have continued to occur in recent years all over the U.S. at an alarming rate, feeding into the very real sense of paranoia that has gripped the black community.

The world is asking, “What is going on in America?”