North American Project’s Statement on the George Floyd Tragedy
“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Since our founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, we have seen a Civil War that aimed to turn those claims of liberty for all into a reality; a women’s suffrage movement arguing the gender neutrality of the word “Men”; and a civil rights movement struggling to make certain that “all” meant “all.” Yet, once again, we are reminded that the struggle for equality is not over, as the video of George Floyd, a black man, suffering a senseless death under the knee of a police officer, traverses the world. The perpetrator’s posture — a near mirror image of Colin Kaepernick’s iconic “taking the knee” — marked a devastating parallel with the symbolic gesture that drew a red line in America’s cultural war over race and the practices of law enforcement in America.
The declared mission of the North American Project is to change the narrative surrounding the U.S.-Mexico binational experience. We believe that the mainstreaming of hate speech and the media’s trafficking in negative stereotypes played a definitive role in the ethnically motivated attack that ended the lives of 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in August 2019. This same unfathomable thinking now fuels racial discontent in a way that the United States has not seen since the civil rights era.
Ideologues of the so-called alt-right attempt to portray diversity as some sort of liberal, multicultural experiment in social engineering. This form of historical revisionism, spawned in large part from conspiracy-minded thinking and racial paranoia, reflects other iterations of nativist and nationalist movements that have, in the past, appealed “to the bad angels of our nature,” as deceased Arizona senator John McCain said of the tea party.
America is, and has always been, at its core, a diverse nation; it was born that way. The proverbial American apple pie, defining the essence of what it is American, could be replaced with jambalaya, taco salad, chicken parmesan or fortune cookies. The world is drawn to American culture, precisely because of its ability to break barriers. Our diversity is our strength, as seen with the code talkers who used the Navajo language to win the Pacific in World War II.
An insensitive discourse on race can be debilitating, and the source of great weaknesses. Our current cultural divide has proven, unfortunately, to be immensely lucrative to the media and politicians of all stripes; it is a zero-sum game, however, for “We the People.” The George Floyd affair is a rare instance where both sides of the aisle — including members of the law enforcement community — have acknowledged the abusive behavior of the Minneapolis police officer, now charged with murder, and the underlying systemic problem that persists within law enforcement.
Before the political extremists and the media turn the narrative into one of racial lawlessness in opposition to law and order, we should take this opportunity to come together as a nation to heal the wounds between the black community and our men and women in blue. We must do this by exercising the “Consent of the Governed,” as stated in the Declaration of Independence, to alter our current mode of governing that has become antagonistic and destructive to the “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” for many Americans.
North American Project, Editorial Board
