Once again we watch with horror as a man begged for his life, handcuffed, face down on his stomach on the ground, as an American police officer, knee on his neck, murdered him in broad daylight.

George Floyd was the latest in a long list of victims of police brutality crying about losing the breath of life.  In 2015 Eric Harris said, “I am losing my breath” after he cried, “Oh God, he shot me.” And the deputy in the video is heard responding “F—your breath.” A year earlier in 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed 18 year old, shot and killed by a policeman, his body uncovered, exposed to the sun for more than four hours as his mother and this whole nation watched the agony and desecration.

We watched as blood spread on the white shirt of 32-year-old Philando Castile shot by a police officer.  We heard as his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds pleaded with the police. In the backseat of the car her little four-year girl cried, “I am here.”

Children in black families learn early in their lives that they are not full citizens with equal rights in the eyes of the law in America. For them there is a separate and unequal early childhood education, an oral tradition of how to behave when stopped by police. The rhetoric that police are there to protect citizens does not translate to real black childhood experiences.

Nowadays, a camera on every phone makes us witnesses and participants. Offering condolences and prayers are not enough. If we grieve for the victims and bereaved families and friends we can’t resort once again to the narrative of “bad apples” among police officers. The police are not aliens who have come to live in our midst uninvited and causing trouble; they are Americans who live in our culture that for far too long has been harboring  racism. The police unique feature is that when they terrorize, and lynch and kill black citizens they are protected by their badges, their legitimated, authorized power. They are also protected by the fact that white America is not exposed to this brutality and is willing to hold on to the myth of police protection.

The tragedies we have witnessed are not just about police behavior. They are symptoms of a social fact of denying African American full civil rights. Full citizenship is granted to whites as a birthright and they are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Citizenship rights are denied to blacks in daily life, and routinely. They are, a priori, presumed to be guilty of something. Their ascribed “guilt” is as amorphous as it is pervasive and made-up. They are conjured to be shoplifters in stores, thieves in affluent neighborhoods, muggers when they wear hoodies, cheaters when using food stamps, criminals when they watch birds, or jog.

Our racism is a hand-me-down from slavery; it is rooted in the objectification of people as bodies to be treated with contempt, which has run through Jim Crow, and segregation de jure and de facto; always a hidden volcano right under our good earth of Civil Rights and “I have a dream,” and a twice-elected black president.

So where do where we stand now? The last few days a phrase of the 1960s has made its reappearance, the “long, hot summer.” Will it be a summer of civil disturbance, of grievance and counter-grievance? All that we can say is that Americans are worried, our social contract, such as it is, is fraying. Our political institutions are in complete disarray; our president is a buffoon, both malevolent and incompetent. Forty million Americans are out of work; everyone knows things will not return to the way they were during what is being called the “before time.” No one knows how different our new future will be.

The horrible events in Minneapolis this week should remind everyone that black citizenship has never been fully realized, and can never be assumed or taken for granted. And if the events of recent months have taught us nothing else, it is that America is changing in fundamental ways and the stress of the pandemic has only heightened the pace of the changes. As to whether the changes will improve things or make them worse, only time will tell, and only the American people can fight to make them better, and see to it that George Floyd did not die in vain.

Will this be a turning point in American history or will this be another of those potential turning points when nothing really turns? Can the Democrats and Joe Biden be a part of the solution? If they have a chance to make a meaningful turn to make America safe for all its people, they would need all of us.