2020: The Tipping Point & “Black Lives Matter”—More Contagious Than Covid-19
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“We are all, at heart, gradualists, our expectations set by the steady passage of time. But the world of the Tipping Point is a place where the unexpected becomes the expected, where radical change is more than possibility. It is—contrary to all our expectations—a certainty.”
-Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
We all know the boiling frog fable. The notion that you can boil a frog alive and it won’t jump out so long as you gradually increase the temperature vs. throwing the frog into a pot of boiling water right off the bat.
What we sometimes forget is that the fable isn’t really about frogs. It’s about human nature. And our lazy complacency and complicit acceptance of the status quo.
Our gradualist nature.
But unlike the frogs, we still have a chance to jump out once we reach the boiling point, “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point (Gladwell).”
Some people wonder what it was specifically about George Floyd’s death that caused such a contagious uproar, when just a few short weeks prior, a 26-year-old black EMT, nurse-in-training, Covid-patient caretaker was murdered in her sleep – shot at least 8 times by police officers at the wrong address when the suspect was already in custody.
(Breonna Taylor’s killers still haven’t been arrested, BTW.)
And there have been countless horrific, wildly unjust, race-based murders & violence, bogus criminal charges & egregious indictments, and otherwise generally blatant discriminatory behavior against the black community in America since the dawn of our inception.
This pot has been bubbling to a boil for some time now.
It just so happened that George Floyd’s death was the tipping point. The tipping point of this epidemic of systemic abuse, racism, and violent bigotry.
But now there’s something else spreading like wildfire. And it is the cure to the aforementioned epidemic. It is the Black Lives Matter movement.
Back to the “Beginning”
Perhaps it was back in 2012 when the water in this pot really started gurgling to a bubble.
Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American high-school boy, was carrying a bag of Skittles and wearing a hoodie in his father’s fiancée’s neighborhood when a 28-year-old mixed-race man named George Zimmerman shot and killed him.
Zimmerman was acquitted after claiming “self-defense” although Martin was unarmed.
A physical altercation took place between the two on February 26, 2012 in a gated Sanford, Florida community – Zimmerman was the neighborhood watch coordinator.
Ironically, he was also working towards a degree in criminal justice and said his goal was to become a judge.
Details of the case and evidence are murky at best. We do not know exactly why Zimmerman followed Martin after calling 911 to report a suspicious person. But we do know that a police dispatcher advised Zimmerman to stop following the boy prior to the physical confrontation.
We also know that this ignited a powerful #BlackLivesMatter movement with numerous protests.
President Obama famously said to Martin’s parents, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."
Since then, an ongoing national conversation has been heating up over rampant inequality in the justice system.
Psychology of the Black Lives Matter Movement
An interesting thing to note about both Trayvon Martin and George Floyd is the power of pissed off parents to change the world.
Martin was a 17-year-old boy – and hell hath no fury like a mother or father whose child is harmed, let alone, murdered for seemingly no reason at all.
George Floyd called out, gasping for his “mama” in his final moments, under the knee of an officer that was suffocating him slowly.
And although Floyd’s mother had passed prior to her son’s murder, his words reached millions of mothers around the nation.
Protesters and social media influencers from all walks of life held signs and made posts and videos with a clear message: “All mothers were summoned when George Floyd called out for his mama.”
Credit: Mikayla Carter | MLive.com
Historically, mothers have had an extremely powerful role in lots of societal “tipping points.”
Think back to the contaminated drinking water sagas from Tom’s River, New Jersey… Parkersburg, West Virginia (DuPont)…
Scientists were having a difficult time “proving” the validity of cancer clusters – particularly childhood cancers like leukemia – being anything other than statistical flukes.
Gathering sufficient evidence and testing all the potential variables would have taken decades, and a lot of money and resources. And where were the scientists going to get the grants to fund such an undertaking when corporate giants were paying people off left-and-right to keep their dirty little toxic-sludge secrets hidden deep down in the ground?
Reporters had to rely on people besides scientists for stories of toxic industrial waste to gain momentum. In order to challenge multi-billion-dollar corporations and get communities cleaned up, pissed off mothers who had tragically lost their own children were at the forefront of these movements.
Similarly, this Black Lives Matter movement is gaining significant momentum from pissed off parents tired of losing children in their communities, and tired of being quietly complicit in the obvious systemic abuses that allow hate and bigotry to adulterate our neighborhoods, schools, shopping malls, churches, bars, casinos, and work spaces.
And there’re few things in this world as powerful as the raw grief emanating from a mother or father seeking closure amid the confused, maddening chaos of murder.
With the past decade’s increase of mass shootings, all parents now live in fear for their children. Fear not tied to one’s race, socioeconomic status, or heritage.
It is a terrible fear any mother or father could relate to and find in common with any other mother or father.
As tragic as that is, perhaps it gave non-blacks the perspective needed to keep this fire burning. Perhaps that is why we are now better able to empathize with something that is otherwise absolutely unfathomable to any white person privileged merely by the hue of their complexion.
Because murder is undeniably unfathomable. And murder under the hands of a systemically corrupt system that doesn’t prosecute those bad-apples is abhorrent.
We teach children about the importance of law and order and they idolize policemen/women for protecting society from an early age. So, while we owe them respect, we also need to hold them to high standards. Because respect, by its very nature, is earned, not granted by default.
Because there is dangerous power brimming behind those power-hungry, aggressive bad apples as they exert their ideas and behaviors like untouchable gods. As they ride around and train new police officers who gradually adopt similar worldviews and habits.
Because we are all, at heart, impressionable gradualists. We are all vulnerable to the “herd mentality” — or “pack”/ “mob” mentality.
That kind of influence can completely contaminate the entire police and justice system. That kind of power in society is equally strong as a parent’s grieving wrath.
Both sides gain strength in numbers through the psychology of the “herd” mentality.
The major difference is, everyone in society has a mother and a father. And countless of us have our own children. And as long as our newfound shared ability to empathize with the idea that, of course, all lives matter doesn’t hinder our ability to see, plain and clear, that the time is long past nigh for the emphasis to be on “black lives matter”.
We’ve been gradually working towards this long overdue onslaught of systemic change for literally hundreds of years. But George Floyd’s death was the tipping point. And I think this tipping point is just one small microcosm mirroring a massive change in society…
Everything about 2020 from the pandemic forcing us to realize we don’t need to live in offices 16 hours a day to get work done, “black lives matter” showing the government and racists that “enough is enough”, the Supreme Court overruling Trump’s reversal of healthcare rights for trans Americans, uproar over migrant children still in cages…
This year has forced us to come together over shared tragedies. Whether Covid-19 took a loved one or your job, or you struggled to homeschool your children but were grateful you didn’t have to stress over a potential school shooting, joined friends and family to protest systemic injustice that’s cracked the very foundation of this country and the freedom we plan to celebrate in a couple of weeks…
There is no doubt in my mind that this is the Tipping Point. And there’s no doubt in my mind that the power of hope and demands for these humanitarian changes are more contagious than the “silent majority.”
P.S. it’s okay to condemn violence, looting, and arson but still believe that the right to protest is a pillar of American society to keep us in check.
Credit: @BDaveWalters Twitter account
