Our Yet to Be United States of America: An Exclusive Guest Post from Michael Eric Dyson, Author of Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

There is little doubt that 2020 has been a year of life-changing turmoil. It began in late January with the national mourning of the untimely death of basketball great Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gigi and seven others in a Los Angeles helicopter crash. It continued in the global onslaught of COVID-19 in March, the revelation in early May of the February hunting and killing in Georgia by alleged white vigilantes of Ahmaud Arbery, the death in Minnesota of George Floyd at the hands, and knees, of cops in May (and the later focus on the shooting death in Kentucky of Breonna Taylor by cops in March), and the protests for racial justice that resulted, the largest in the nation’s history. That was followed by the shooting of Jacob Blake in the back by a cop in Wisconsin in late August that led to a work stoppage in the National Basketball Association and a renewed cry for social justice led by its players. And there was a bitterly fought presidential race in a grievously divided nation whose outcome is just being officially certified.
It is now more clear than ever that we are confronted in America with a syndemic, the convergence of dual pandemics: one caused by a globally contagious virus that has killed more than a million folks worldwide and had an especially harmful effect in our country on the Black and brown peoples; the other a searing outbreak of white supremacy and racial injustice that revealed the persistent systemic inequities that remain. The fatalities that result from them both are often unified by a single cry: I can’t breathe — whether from lungs turned to sponge because of the disease’s virulent spread, or Black bodies being suffocated in the merciless embrace of conscienceless cops. The syndemic reminds us that we must fight to reform the poor health care systems that render Black and brown bodies more vulnerable to dying from COVID-19. And the plague of racism certainly isn’t quarantined to cops: the immediate past president of the United States used his bully pulpit to perpetuate legacies of white supremacy, ideas of white nationalism, and practices of xenophobia that aimed contempt at immigrants from Africa, Asia and South and Central America.
As we glimpse a new daybreak with the arrival of a wizened white man of worldly wisdom taking up residence in the Oval Office, aided by a serenely sincere and soulful sage and soldier of a Black and Asian woman by his side, we are heartened by the prospect of being able to push them to embrace even greater forms of social justice and political care than they already endorse, and to push ourselves to be far more loving of each other and tolerant of a multitude of differences as we navigate our perilous but promising future. We must recover a sense of national mission-driven more by charity and compassion than crude concerns for cash and commerce. We must challenge ourselves to look beyond our individual pains, and our group’s legitimate grievances, as we articulate a universal conception of justice that uplifts the downtrodden, spotlights the hurts of the most vulnerable, and endorses the welfare of a common good defined by commitment to precious ideals of truth, consideration of science and evidence, and the unapologetic celebration of humane sharing of resources.
As the late literary marvel Maya Angelou said, we live in the “Yet to be United States,” but if we try, we can at least edge closer to the sort of union that would make both Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Tubman proud.