Black Lives Matter and a Return to Western Ideals

As I write this, Rochester NY is well into its second week of protesting and violence surrounding the death of Daniel Prude earlier in March. The mixture of peaceful protests and violence has created a delicate balance as government officials and police try and protect the rights of protesters, while at the same time defending themselves against violence that has erupted against police and the community.

Rochester is not new to race riots, but the race riots during the summer of 1964 were at the height of the civil rights movement, where the goals and demands were more profound than they seem to be today. As horrible and unjustified as the deaths of George Floyd and Daniel Prude are, one might ask if the protests which have ensued demand the same level of attention and gravitas as the protests did in the 1960s.

Listening to the protesters in Rochester, the demands seem almost trivial. I polled my students recently on what they thought were the main objectives of the current protests. They all agreed that the key demands were to defund the police or reform the police, fire and perhaps prosecute the police chief La'Ron Singletary. And they want the resignation of the Rochester mayor, mayor Lovely Warren. Both the police chief and the mayor are African Americans. The local press reported the same demands from one of the organizers of Free the People Roc, which is a liberation movement founded in the shadow of Black Lives Matter, the organization.

In the debacle over who knew what and when in Rochester, the protesters achieved one of their goals so far as the police chief recently resigned, along with his top officers. Will the Rochester Mayor follow suit? I doubt it. And more recently, protesters have been calling for the resignation of Sandra Doorley, the Monroe County District Attorney.

But so what? Or better, now what? If everyone resigns or is fired, then what do you do? Are people across the country going to rally around the idea of firing cops or defunding police departments? We will see what happens in Portland and in other cities venturing down this path. But polling on this issue suggests that this view is far from universally popular.

Despite the ongoing protests, I am not convinced that this movement will gain the same level of results that happened in the civil rights era. In its current iteration, the protests have neither the universal goals that can unite people nor the moral voice of a Martin Luther King Jr. (among others) to lead it.

In the 1960s, King wanted racial equality, not the firing of a police chief. He wanted to end discrimination and segregation, not merely to fire a mayor. King had a vision and a dream, informed as it was by his Christian faith as both a Ph.D. in theology and a baptist minister. His dream attracted everyone except for the KKK and his competitors such as Malcolm X, whose Nation of Islam was to militant for the masses.

On August 28, 1963, King attracted some 300,000 people to the Mall in Washington DC with no help from Facebook or Twitter. He didn't talk about reforming police or prosecuting a cop or mayor. And he didn't throw rocks. Instead, he said:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today." Even today, his message is universally compelling.

What happened to Daniel Prude and George Floyd should never have happened. Two human beings were treated as though they were not human. Whatever our state in life: our color, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, criminal record, mental or physical health, born or unborn--whatever our state in life, people deserve to be treated like the human beings they are. And that's the message that's being lost today.

For there to be any lasting change or universal agreement, the discussion about police brutality and racial injustice needs to be elevated beyond the banal calls for the resignation of a police chief or the defunding of police departments—ideas that will inevitably be politicized and receive no universal consent.

Regardless of our differences, we need to remember who we are and from where we've come. Our Western ideals of human dignity, human respect, and human value grounded as they are in the Christian theological principle of the Imago Dei (the Image of God) may be the only way we get beyond the petty objectives that ironically devalue the men and women who recently lost their lives. The West has not always lived up to these ideals, but we still fight for them because they are right and good. Dr. King clung to those ideals and in doing so changed the course of race relations forever.

Those Western values and ideals are the same values that many people today seek to eliminate and repudiate. And without them, the protesters will merely get what they want. But then what?