My last article was about Ti Ti’s response to my postcard that I found in a box of loafers that I bought online from Amazon. I wanted her critique of my assertion that I was the guy standing on the roof of a wrecked airplane.

I saw the guy standing on the roof of the plane saying, “I’m still alive.” Both he and I have crashed often in our lives, but we are definitely asserting that we are still alive. I wanted to have Ti Ti’s spin on my belief. I have danced with death twice a dozen years ago. And I am dancing, like most of the world, with the coronavirus lurking somewhere wanting to dance.

I am aware that I am alive but am determined to do something positive in the world rather than sitting back until I croak. In my remaining time, I can accomplish something that will benefit the next generation. It is interesting that it is in giving that we get; it is a two-way street. I am grateful as I look back over the last half dozen years to discover a part of my family. I plan to go back in another year and a half. They are a large part of my world, which all started with Ti Ti.

Several days after receiving an email from Ti Ti about the photo, I got an email from Ti Ti’s mother, Moh Moh. On election night nearly four years ago, I got a similar email from her. At that time, she could not believe that America had elected Trump. I replied that I too was amazed and troubled. Since then, America has had to deal with the worst litany of racist, sexist, and xenophobic utterances of President Donald the Dumb.

Any student that I will be teaching starting next week’s summer semester would be light-years a better president than what we have today tweeting in the White House. And I don’t know anything about any of those students in either class yet. The class won’t start until Monday. Nevertheless, they are all brighter than Donald the Dumb.

Trump, the leader of our nation during the COVID-19 pandemic, is responsible for the deaths of 36,000 Americans. Had he enacted social distancing sooner, a week sooner, thousands of Americans would be alive today.

This is from The New York Times regarding a Columbia University research group.

By Weiyi Cai·Source: “Differential Effects of Intervention Timing on COVID-19 Spread in the United States,” by Sen Pei, Sasikiran Kandula and Jeffrey Shaman, Columbia University

However, this email from Moh Moh was inquiring why George Floyd was killed. Most people overseas are better informed than 90% of Americans are informed about what is happening in most parts of the world outside the US. I wrote to Moh Moh a long email about the killing of Floyd. However, this is my open letter to the world. It is about America from a white American’s point of view.

I am embarrassed by my country…starting with Trump all the way down to many average Americans. The way I feel parallels what “Liberty Enlightening the World” has felt about America for a long time.

Lady Liberty is troubled.

George Floyd’s problem was that he was black. In America, blacks must be concerned with white racists. Ahmaud Arbery was killed on February 23 by white vigilantes. George Floyd was killed on May 25 by a white cop. If you are black in America, you are born with two strikes against you. If you are a black male, you have three strikes against you.

George Floyd was a black man who lived in Minneapolis. He was handcuffed and on the ground with a cop’s knee on his neck for over eight minutes…over nearly three minutes after wasn’t moving; he was dead. You can’t imagine the rage that I felt. A white cop has a black guy handcuffed and laying on his stomach, and the cop has his knee on his neck. Floyd is telling him that he can’t breathe. It took three days to arrest the cop and charge him with 3rd degree murder, which means he killed him, but they couldn’t prove that he wanted to kill George Floyd. What? If he were handcuffed and lying on his stomach, why would you need to even touch him let alone having your knee pressing against his neck? The answer is that the cop is a racist. And the prosecutor can’t determine the cop’s intent charge the cop with 1st degree murder? At the end of this essay, The New York Times compiled videos of how the police handled the arrest.

I was in high school when whites finally got involved with the civil rights movement. Things haven’t changed much in America in the past six decades. Back then, America had white cops killing blacks. America also had whites vigilantes killing blacks along with some white supporters of the blacks. And that is not fake news.

While I was in college, I went South having helped put together a workcamp in Ozone, Tennessee. It wasn’t a part of some protest movement related to racism. It was merely a workcamp to help fix up an old country church. The minister’s name was Joe Paulus, a white Presbyterian pastor. While I drove a station wagon returning late in the evening to the church, I was followed by a car for miles. This is the account of that night.

So, what is the genesis of racism in America? Inferiority. Whites feel inferior to blacks…especially black males. It can be seen in every aspect of the American society. Whites feared blacks in sports. Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. Inferiority kept sports segregated for decades. Even during WWII, the US military was segregated. The Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that separate but equal was unconstitutional. It took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to stop segregation of restaurants in the South.

When the British established colonies in America, the first slave was brought to Point Comfort in 1619 for the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. In 1776, our country was founded based upon the inequality of blacks. George Washington had slaves. The Civil War began nearly a century later. It began in 1861 and ended in 1865. Civil War caused the loss of 620,000 soldiers to end slavery, which it did.

However, little else changed, especially in the South. Precisely a century later, I went to college in 1961 and graduated in 1965. The Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. However, still black males were killed by the police or by white vigilantes, which should raise the question, why?

The answer is simple. Many Americans in the police departments across the nation and people in general don’t accept blacks as equal to whites. Racism in America is based on inferiority…the inferiority of many whites. In all aspects of our humanity, many whites don’t like feeling inferior to blacks. Therefore, they lashed out at blacks, but especially black males.

In my email to Moh Moh about George Floyd, I mentioned that the white British colonized Burma in the 19th century. George Orwell, who was British and worked in Burma at the time, saw how many of his white countrymen treated the Burmese. Orwell and I share the same attitude toward the hypocrisy of racism. When will Americans realized that our racism as a nation is physically killing blacks and those that don’t die are being emotionally killed by Americans, which started four centuries ago?

We are living now with an openly racist president. There is no one in this world that Trump hates more than President Barack Obama. Trump started to stoke the Birtherism issue. Trump claimed that Obama wasn’t born in America but Kenya and is a Muslim. Then Trump claimed that Obama was wiretapping his campaign for the White House. Trump wants to shelve Obamacare. Trump feels inferior to blacks, and he hates President Obama most of all. He knows that he isn’t even close to Obama’s IQ. To coverup his problems with his intellect and mental health, he claims, “Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.” Trump, no one buys that and neither do you.

In the wake of the killing of George Floyds, there have been mass protests across all America. However, Trump wants to change the subject from racism to rioting. Rioting didn’t cause racism. Racism caused the rioting.

Look at the mix of colors of the protesters.

When protestors marched in Washington, DC, our macho leader sheltered in place…in the underground bunker of the White House. While he hides and shelters in place, a staffer needs to send him a video of Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar. I’d suggest this video of Julius Caesar.

One moment. I have second thoughts about that video. It takes two hours, which is a long time for Trump to stay focused. This video, by SparkNotes of Julius Caesar, only takes nine minutes. As a last resort, someone could just whisper in his ear, “Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.”

This video tells the story of Floyd’s murder.