When You View Another Person As An "It", Racism Flourishes

“How is it that you can love the Creator but hate what He created?”   –Carlos Wallace

How?!

How could one human being put their knee down upon the neck of another human being, and then push with so much weight and strength, and then not move from that position for eight minutes and forty nine seconds?  Even as that fellow child of God was already immobilized by handcuffs, was already face down on the ground.  Even as the petty crime the man was accused of was passing a counterfeit $20 bill.

How could three other human beings, folks in authority, watch as that fellow police officer continued to crush a person’s throat, cut off his air supply, even as George Floyd cried out: “I can’t breathe! My neck hurts! Everything hurts! Water or something, please! I can’t breathe.”  Floyd became unresponsive and after being transported by ambulance to the hospital, was pronounced dead later that evening, presumably from asphyxiation. 

How does that kind of cruelty, wanton abuse of power, institutionally sanctioned violence, continue as the norm far too often in how folks of color are treated by police officers, by the people who are supposed to be sworn to serve and to protect the public, and to keep the peace? How, even in the very rare instances when criminal charges are brought, is it almost unheard of for any law enforcement official to spend any time in jail for such crimes?  How do grand juries choose not to indict? How do juries vote to acquit? 

How?

Well, if you treat another being not as a subject, not as an equal, not as a neighbor, not as a child of God just like you, deserving dignity, mercy and respect; if you treat someone, instead, as an object, as an “it”, then it is not so hard to hurt them.  To hate them. To stereotype them. To condemn them, and yes, to kill them.  Because they are an “it”, a thing, and when we turn a real flesh and blood person into an object, they become “less than” in our eyes.

Less than human.

In the 1923 book “I and Thou”, the Jewish Philosopher Martin Buber described two kinds of relationships in this world. The first is “I-thou”. 

When we see another as a thou, we see them as a subject, as having personhood, as being worthy, as being just as loved by God as anyone else. When we relate to another as a “thou” we have empathy, because in them, we see ourselves, we see common humanity. When we honor another as a “thou” we do all that we can to make our shared life good and just and whole and loving, recognizing that each of us breathes the same air, and walks the same streets and claims the same dreams for our own lives and the lives of those we love. When we see another as a “thou” we are humble enough to know that they have something to teach us.

But when we see another as an “it”?

We consciously and unconsciously deem their life as less worthy than our own. Then we are able to justify our disdain for that person because “they” are part of “them” and “those people” are always doing this or doing that and bringing it upon “themselves”.  And if only “they” would be more like us, then life would be better. When we see another human being as an object, we look down upon their culture and their history and their experience because it does not mirror our own, because the rest of the world is supposed to live just like we do, right? When we see another child of God as less than divinely created, we might even use our faith in God to justify rejection of that other person’s faith or religion, believing that if the other does not take our specific path to heaven, then clearly they are not deserving of salvation, or even God’s love.

To see the folks we share this world with as our brothers and sisters, as “thous”: people of all colors and many religions and many ways of expressing love and many amazingly diverse cultures or….

To see the folks we share this world with as a threat because they do not look like us or talk like us or live like us or worship like us or love like us and so it is our right to hold them back, hold them down, push them away, judge them as second class while we are first class….

What then will it be? 

Until the answer is “thou”, the world will continue to bleed, and choke, and be torn apart by the sin of seeing the other as an “it”.  George Floyd was thou. Of that I am absolutely sure.

God rest his soul.