Observations-Sincerity

In this time of chaos and rage surrounding the murder of George Floyd, we are seeing something unusual happening. What were once forbidden topics, institutional racism and Black Lives Matter have rapidly become a regular part of public discussions. As a result of that normalization of those topics, we have seen many companies and organizations putting out statements in support of Black Lives Matter, in support of racial equality, and in support of the protests against institutionalized racism. While it is heartening to see that these major institutions and corporations who have traditionally been against any kind of protest and against property destruction come out in favor of the present Black Lives Matter protests, you can’t help but wonder about their sincerity. I cannot know their intents but at the same time my cynical side makes me wonder why are they coalescing around racial equality? Is it the gruesomeness of the video of George Floyd getting suffocated under the knee of Derek Chauvin? Is it possible that we have gone past our collective moral tipping point regarding inequality and racial discrimination? Has corporate America decided that enough is enough? Or are they still playing the cynical public relations game? How can we honestly believe that this radical turnabout from their historical response is sincere?

 The statements and proclamations from institutions and companies are professionally written and crafted in the usual PR way. In fact, they are so professional and risk averse that the statements comes off as trite and soulless.  They hit the major points in a cursory fashion in order to explicitly tell you what they think you want to hear. As I am reading a small sample of these public statements, none of the proclamations have excited me and made me sit up and take notice. Given the lackluster and passionless wordsmithing, the question is: do I believe them? Can I or should I take their statements at face value? Since I have developed into a cynical guy in my old age, I try to determine their sincerity.

 I am seeing if I can detect any amount of sincerity behind those blandly polished words. I am wondering if they are real sentiments, felt deeply in the soul of those purportedly behind the written word or are they mere meaningless gestures, unfeeling and procedural. There are two examples that happened recently in conjunction with the protests that also deserves to be put under the microscope and scrutinized.

The first is the Drew Bree’s apology for his initial video regarding the protests. He had mistaken the purpose of Colin Kaepernick’s act of protest, taking a knee. He unequivocally condemned the act because he believed that it was an act to dishonor the military and the flag: the mythology propagated by the right-wing propaganda machine, which completely ignored the fact that Kaepernick was advised by a former Green Beret, Nate Boyer, to kneel during the national anthem rather than sit on the bench. It seems incredible that Drew Brees, an NFL veteran in a league that is 70% black, could still believe the right-wing propaganda after working, sweating, and toiling with Black men. Either he was being disingenuous as he was playing with these Black men, or he had never discussed the situation with the men that he is supposed to lead. Which is what made me question his sincerity when he immediately apologized for his earlier assertion. The mea culpa came quickly, after a number of sports figures condemned his assertion, in the most emotional and unsparing manners possible. His Saints teammates were brutal in their reply to him, which I suspect may have played a major role in his reversal. So, was Brees sincere in declaring that he is now “woke” and knows better? Or is it because he wants to win, and he knew his chances for winning were disintegrating fast? Or was he looking at his legacy in professional sports? He has always had a great reputation for being a man of integrity and a speaker of truth. He has surely blown that reputation to smithereens in one short video and the apology for that video.

The other example is Roger Goodell’s video statement to the world, admitting that he and the NFL had erred irrevocably when they banned the players kneeling for the national anthem in the aftermath of the Kaepernick protest. It only took him four years to realize that he was in the wrong. Four. Freaking. Years.  He oversees the richest most profitable sports league in north America. The man is responsible for the direction of the league, and it took him four years to admit that he was wrong. I wonder how the owners and television executives feel about Goodell’s lightning fast response. I wonder if they care. I am sure they do not.

Why the turnaround for Goodell? His case is not the same as Brees’ because the time between the initial action and then the reversal was four years. Brees’ case can be directly and quickly attributed to the potential PR disaster. Can Goodell be accused of the same mercenary motivation? The answer is probably. Opportunism and mercenary intentions are always good motivators for those who are weak, even though Goodell had the perfect excuse, he can just do nothing. If he did nothing, and said nothing, no one would have noticed because that was the norm that everyone expected from NFL. Was he making the statement to placate 70% of his workforce? He did not care about them when he banned kneeling, why should he care now?

It all comes down to sincerity. Were the companies sincere when their PR hacks put out the vanilla statements? Was Brees sincere when he made his initial statement? Or was he sincere when he walked it back a day later? Was Goodell sincere when he condemned racial protest? Or was he sincere when he apologized from making his initial mistake, four years in the making.

I cannot say whether any one of them are sincere. I can not read into their hearts and minds to discern truthfulness. I do have my opinions, but they are my opinions and not proven truths. So the questions remain out there. Were they sincere or not?

The answer lies in the long-term actions by everyone who have been doubted. If you are going to talk the walk, they better walk the walk. They cannot just throw their vanilla statements out there and expect it to stick, that time disappeared years ago. They can not just throw money at the problem, although money does help. They must revisit their institutional policies and reinvent them to correct the inequalities that are present in the rules, it does not matter if they are intentional or not. It is time to even the playing field, it is time to eradicate the system of hereditary and racial privilege.

Corporations, Brees and Goodell need to man up, to do as they had promised, to show their sincerity. Not just this week or month or year, but for the rest of their lives.

Sincerity is hard to fake because sincerity has to real.

By the way, this is what a real statement should read like. From the USA Women’s Volleyball NT. No dancing, no weasel words. Straight up declaration.

Say their names: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Trayvon Martin….

USA Women’s Volleyball stands for these names and many more. We stand with the families who are grieving over the loss of a son, a daughter, a spouse, a mother, a father, but most importantly a loved one. We stand for Black lives whose civil liberties have been obstructed by systems of institutionalized racism and who have brutally suffered at the hands of police violence. Freedom and Liberty are rights entitled to all American citizens and it is time to talk about why our Black citizens don’t have them. Enough is enough. It’s time for us to grow and change as a nation. We stand, we support, and we will be that change.

Observation-Tiananmen and the US: Same Picture, 31 years apart

On June 4th 1989, I was in Graduate School in Atlanta and I was having dimsum with other Chinese graduate students. It was at Hong Kong Harbor on Cheshire Bridge Rd. It was in between the main educational institutions in Atlanta where Chinese students are matriculating. As we were enjoying our social gathering and our food, bits and pieces of news were coming through about the crackdown in Tiananmen square. We had been well aware in the days and weeks previously of the protests in Tiananmen Square. We were all at various stages of hopefulness. We had hoped that the mere fact that the students who are in the square protesting are still alive is a good omen for China and for Chinese democracy. Zhao Ziyang was the main communist party leader that had allowed the protests to continue even after Premier Gorbachev had ended his state visit to China, and he became the beacon of hope for us. We remained hopeful even after he was ousted in May of 1989 and there were no movement in the government stance, little did we know that martial law had been declared.

The News was ominous that morning, as the televisions in the restaurant were showing CNN and the coverage showed the  Chinese Army tanks moving in overnight into the square. We all rushed over to Emory University where some of the graduate students there had set up an impromptu rally in the student union. We all took turns speaking our minds and letting go of our emotions. Obviously, there were lots of tears, lots of anger, and despairingly, lots of dashed hope. The Chinese graduate students that I knew from China were mostly sympathetic with the protesters, some even bragged that they knew people who were camped out in the square. It was to them that we turned to earlier that month in order to decipher the signals from Beijing, for the most part they were cautiously optimistic in reading the tea leaves from the Chinese government. All of that disappeared in that one day. The mood changed swiftly from hope and optimism to despair and pain as they became fearful for the lives of their families, their friends, and most all, for the people who were still in Tiananmen Square throughout that week.

Our moods changed yet again as the camera trained on the solitary man with the bag who confronted the tank. He was not going to budge; he was not going to let them through to what we all expected to be a massacre of the people in the square, that was a momentary flash of defiance, we never found out who the lone protester was.

The Chinese government had pulled out all of the local troops that had been on the square during the protests, they were considered to be suspect because they were from the capital city and they knew many of the students, they probably had  families among the protesters. The Chinese government moved in troops from the North who had no connection with the capital city. They had no familial or friendly relationships with any of the protesters. They were to be the cudgel with which the Chinese government will put down the demonstration. That was the plan all along.

Here we are 31 years later. Many things have changed, although the kind of democracy that the protesters were hoping for had never come to fruition. Many of those protesters have escaped to the West and they have found a place to reside in the West, it was not exactly a home but also not exactly a jail either. China has changed significantly since that day but what is important is that Chinese policy about dissent has not changed. China’s actions in Hong Kong recently has shown that they are actively changing their mode of governance in Hong Kong. The laws made in the days immediately after the turnover from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China in 1997 has been either changed or suspended. We expected this to happen all along because we knew it would be very difficult for a Tiger to change his stripes, but once again we were very hopeful that over time the global political situation would change enough to make progress in the Chinese society, enough so that the idea of a democratic self-government would squeeze into China, in between the cracks. It never happened.

Now let us turn the camera to cities here in the United States: Minneapolis, San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Louisville, Atlanta, Columbus, and your own town.

The chaos on June 4 from the United States in 2020 is similar to the chaos in Tiananmen on June 4 in 1989, we see tear gas, we see rubber bullets in 2020 while they used real bullets in 1989. In China we saw armored troops, we saw the police in their militarized equipment using the riot shields. One of the significant differences is that the armored troop carrier's or tanks in the streets of Beijing are not present in the USA of 2020, yet. Although this present administration seem eager to put those weapons at the disposal of the police and troops.

There was an instance in Washington DC of a military helicopter using aggressive flying tactics to disperse the crowds, tactics that our military had used in Iraq and Afghanistan as a show of force against our military enemies. Think about that a second, same tactics being used against citizens as they did against enemies.

We saw pictures of National guardsmen in military equipment battle ready to take on an imaginary enemy on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a very jarring visual to say the least. We see flashbang grenades and tear gas launched into the crowds to disperse them and we see also see some aggressive tactics being used on the demonstrators.

Yet we also see the police taking a knee with the protesters. We see the Sheriff in Flint MI take off his helmet and join the protesters in a march. We saw many police taking knees and then hugging the protesters because they were ashamed of what some of their brethren had done. We also saw a black woman police officer chase and shut down a fellow policeman after he was acting aggressively to a protester that was already on her knees. Thank goodness for the differences. It differentiates the United States of America year 2020 and the People's Republic of China 1989. Yet the similarity is what is troubling, or should be troubling, and no amount of dissimilarity should obfuscate the fact that we as a nation and culture are closer to being the totalitarian police state of China od 1989 than to the United States that we had assumed to be the norm in our dreams.

The present administration had threatened to mobilize the federal troops into each of the cities and sovereign states to forcefully put down the protests and riots. It sent chills down my spine as I recalled the Chinese government bringing in northern soldiers to replace the police and soldiers stationed near Beijing because they were too close emotionally and were too familiar with the protesters. The media footage of the police taking a knee and their show of  empathy with the protesters is not what a totalitarian regime wants to see.

How did it ever come to this? How did we, the land of hopes and dreams for those Chinese dissidents in 1989 come to be so familiar to what they were experiencing in China? How did United States of America in 2020 become more similar to People's Republic of China 1989 than to the United States in 1989?

I hear people proclaiming that we are better than this behavior, on both sides of the divide. We protest that these rioting and looting is not the real us, yet, we see that there are white people who are looting and rioting in order to fan the flames of hatred against the protester. The latest tabulation says that out of the arrests made in Minneapolis, 20% of the people are from out of state, agitators, and fomenters of chaos? Definitely. For what cause? We do not really know. Rumor is that there are both left wing and right-wing agitators among the groups. The present administration wants the blame the antifas for everything, even though no one has the true breakdown of numbers yet, that is lying at best and promoting a race war at worst. I don't know how many of the rioters fall under either camp, but I could see the white supremacists’ agitators from Charlottesville being encouraged by the present administration of taking advantage of the chaos. So actually, it is us, a microcosm of us.

Going back to the comparison between the United States and China, The Chinese laws and legal system and infrastructure in 1989 were not race based, although some are, specifically the racial minorities in the northern China. The governance rules were built to protect the public order, the public order being any dissent against the communist party. It was totalitarianism.

Here in the United States in 2020, the protesting was against the uneven application of laws because of inequalities in the economic and judicial systems. The governance rules were also supposed to be built to preserve the public order, except in our case the intent was not supposed to be totalitarianism, it was supposed to protect and promote dissent and plurality.

So how did the two events in supposedly different systems end up looking so much alike? Is it because we have grown to be closer to totalitarianism?

The problem with drawing the parallels with the two events is that on the one hand we have 20/20 hindsight, after all, 31 years had elapsed between Tiananmen Square and June 4, 2020, whereas the protests around the nation for George Floyd is still ongoing and no one knows how it would end. But the similarities are jarring all the same and portends more sinister things to come. One does not need to be very imaginative to see that.

I hope I am being pessimistic.