I sat there watching police tear-gassing peaceful protesters in Washington, D.C., just so Donald Trump could hold up a Bible in front of a church that didn’t want him there. These weren’t looters. They weren’t criminals. They were people there to protest the fact that a black man named George Floyd had died with a police officer’s knee on his neck.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve been close to tears over something that didn’t affect me personally, but I was choked up watching what happened in our nation’s capital. I felt like I was watching something that might happen in Tiananmen Square, not in this country. My country. I felt like I was watching the American Dream die before my eyes.

But then I realized that the American Dream is something not everyone has access to — and that’s what these protests are about. It’s not just about George Floyd or even police brutality. It’s about the fact that some people are denied the rights supposedly guaranteed in our founding documents: the right to free assembly for one, but more basically, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. People of color are denied these rights on a daily basis, and not enough of us seem to care.

Numbing effect

I didn’t get choked up over the death of George Floyd, and looking back, I realize why. We’ve become emotionally numb to police violence, to racial violence, because it’s become so common and persistent. The way we’ve become numb to school shootings. The way we’re becoming numb to the hundreds of people dying every day from COVID-19. There’s only so much we can take before something switches off inside us, and we come resigned to what seems like the inevitable.

Racial inequality, oppression and violence has been going on far longer than the coronavirus pandemic or the plague of mass shootings — so long that it’s become ingrained in our culture and we barely even notice it ... unless we’re the victims.

When people try to remind us, we lash out at them because we don’t want to be reminded. We don’t want to admit that the American Dream is in critical condition and that, for many of us, it was stillborn in the first place. We don’t want to admit it, because then we might have to acknowledge that our nation isn’t the shining city on a hill we thought it was; that to some of us this “beacon of hope” casts a shadow of despair.

Peaceful protests

We view peaceful protests that seek to shake us from our self-imposed stupor as acts of violence against the illusion of our greatness. To those of us in denial, they’re not peaceful at all, but frontal assaults on what we want to believe.

When Colin Kaepernick and others knelt peacefully during the national anthem at NFL games four years ago, the response was anything but peaceful. The then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback faced death threats, ostensibly over disrespecting veterans who had fought to defend the flag. But it was never about veterans or the anthem. Nor would the angry deniers allow it to be about what Kaepernick was trying to communicate: the sickening reality of police brutality, directed overwhelmingly against people of color.

(If you think “overwhelmingly” is too strong, consider this: In Minneapolis, two-thirds of those placed in neck restraints — the kind that killed George Floyd — are black. This is in a city where black residents make up just 18.6 percent of residents.)

Those who condemned Kaepernick weren’t defending veterans or even the anthem. They were clinging to what the anthem represented in their minds: an idealistic vision of America that left no room for the grotesque picture of cruelty and corruption Kaepernick was trying to show them. They didn’t want to look at it or even acknowledge its existence, so they lashed out at the man who tried to rouse them from their stupor.

Denial of greatness

Now, led by Donald Trump and empowered by his presidency, they’re doing the same to those who want them to look at pictures of a man being choked to death by a police officer. Trump, you’ll recall, led the charge in condemning Kaepernick and seeking to silence his protests. He didn’t want to hear about it, either, telling supporters: “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when someone disrespects our flag to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. He’s fired.’”

Kaepernick, still in his prime, hasn’t played pro football since that season.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, Trump is once again ignoring the real problem — and compounding it. Instead of addressing the crisis of police violence, Trump has added to it by arming the law enforcement with military equipment, then threatening to send in the military and urging governors to “dominate the streets.”

Trump fancies himself a monarch, and in a way, he is: He’s the king of denial. He denies charges he mistreated women or paid to cover it up. (Given his penchant for using force to get his way in the current situation, his denials of women’s accusations ring all the more hollow.) He denies scientific evidence for climate change. He refuses to acknowledge the senseless tragedy of mass shootings. He wouldn’t face the threat posed by the coronavirus until it was too late to stop more than 100,000 people from dying. And he has refused, throughout his presidency, to acknowledge the stench of racism.

In fact, Trump wants to return us to a time when racism was more overt and explicit than it is today. He wants to “make America great again,” by returning to an imaginary golden age. In doing so, he denies the very thing that makes America — or any nation — truly great.

What he and so many of us fail to understand is that our greatness lies not in achievement, but in possibility. It lies not in what we have done, but what we can do; in our willingness to innovate — to recognize what isn’t working, and to fix it. Innovation created the railroads and the electric light, the national highway system, the phonograph, the telegraph, the motion picture, the internet ... the list goes on and on. We didn’t create these things by clinging to a false view of our own exceptional identity (read: supremacy), but on envisioning and working toward a future that’s truly exceptional.

Behind the mask

We must be honest with ourselves. Do we yearn for this imaginary golden age because we’re ignorant of the horrors we inflicted on one another during those supposed halcyon days? Certainly not, because we all know the stories of Jackie Robinson and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., whose name adorns schools and streets and parks across the country. Are we in denial, because we don’t want to acknowledge our past failures? Undoubtedly.

But do we dare to consider the possibility that there’s something more to it than that. Do we, on some level, seek a return to a time when everything was more orderly: when everything — and everyone — was in their “proper” place? Children were seen and not heard. Women were in the kitchen. The Japanese were in internment camps, the Chinese were in Chinatown, the Mexicans were in Mexico. And people of color were subservient to their pale-skinned “masters.”

Such a life may be orderly, but it’s also repugnant (or it should be). Order is one-half of Trump’s drumbeat for “law and order,” a drumbeat of war he uses to suggest using the military against American citizens and silencing protesters who, while peaceful, threaten to unmask the racism that lurks behind our unrelenting denial. The last president to run on a law-and-order platform was also the last megalomaniac to hold the office: Richard Nixon, a man who repeatedly used the n-word in referring to people of color.

But the problem goes far beyond Trump. It’s woven itself into our national fabric.

Here it is in no uncertain terms: More than 150 years after the abolition of slavery, we as a nation still view people of color as somehow less than human. We revere the myth of our founding fathers’ sacred wisdom while conveniently ignoring the fact that many among them were slaveholders. That Thomas Jefferson not only owned slaves but took them to his bed and fathered children by them. And that they codified the status of those slaves, people of color, as being three-fifths of a person.

Let me repeat: Less than human.

Past is prologue

Surely that’s all in the past, you say. We’ve come a long way since then. But have we? Can we truly leave the past behind and move forward if we view the eras of slavery and segregation as the golden age of our republic?

People talk about “systemic racism,” but that’s really just a sterilized term for this question: “When the hell are we going to have the guts to look at what we’re doing to our fellow human beings, realize how abhorrent it is, and stop it?” When will we decide to move forward into a better world rather than longing for a past stained by slavery, carnage and conquest? When are we going to have the courage to really look at our flaws so we can fix them — to face the gravity of what we’ve done so we can stop doing it?

The three-fifths definition and slavery are long past, but somehow we as a nation still treat people of color as though they’re worth less than Euro-Americans.

We preach equality without practicing it. “Of course, black lives matter,” we say. “ALL lives matter!”

“Of course?” Really? If we treated all lives the same, as though they mattered equally, I could buy that. But we don’t. The truth is, “all lives matter” is a just another idealistic myth used by those who don’t want to see the truth: that we treat black lives as though they matter less (three-fifths as much?), and the statistics back it up.

Now what?

We haven’t convinced ourselves, as a nation, that “black lives matter” as much as any other human life. And even if we somehow succeed in doing so, that isn’t the end of our challenge. It’s the beginning. Because is it really enough to say we shouldn’t kill people because of the color of their skin? Shouldn’t we aspire to something far higher? It’s not just that black lives matter; black people matter — their struggles, their dreams, their aspirations, their successes, and their sorrows — the same way every other person does.

Only when we value black lives equally can we honestly say that all lives matter to us, and we’re a very long way from that.

Somehow the American talent for innovation that gave us the airplane and the personal computer, that invented the telephone and put a man on the moon, has failed spectacularly in its most basic test: improving the way we treat our fellow human beings. Especially those we perceive as different.

Only when we do this can the American Dream begin to be realized.

Stephen H. Provost is the author of “Undefeated: Overcoming Prejudice with Grace and Courage,” profiling 45 individuals of diverse backgrounds who have persevered through bigotry and bullying.

Photo: Police in riot gear stand guard May 30, 2020 in Columbus, Ohio, at a protest over George Floyd’s killing. Photo by Paul Becker, CC BY 2.0.