Linkedin is a professional social networking application. Consequently, it has been seen conventionally as sacrosanct, a safe haven, and off-limits for discussions of political, religious, and, in this case, social issues. The fact that so many members have chosen to take a deep dive into the issues surrounding the murder of George Floyd demonstrate that the fragile facade of civility has been brutally ripped off the social contract in America. And people are publicly taking sides -- irrespective or oblivious or unconcerned to the harm it may cause to their public profile, business opportunities, or employment prospects.   
   As a social and behavioral scientist, I find the phenomena to be as instructive as it is refreshing. This particular genie is not going back into the proverbial bottle. And we have come finally to a precipice, a tipping point, an epochal moment where we are collectively experiencing a paradigm shift, which exposes a deep chasm between the haves, the have nots with conscious blacks on one side; and, frightened-out-of-their-wits whites (watching as their waning privilege inexorably erode like a line on an Etch A Sketch® toy with the “browning of America”) obstinately determined to maintain the status quo, who are firmly entrenched on the other. A hodgepodge of other ethnicities have taken up positions on either side of the divide.
   South Africa experienced a similar evolution (many would use revolution interchangeably) in 1994. I was there when Nelson Mandela spoke in Harlem 1990. I watched with great anticipation when he establish the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a court-like restorative justice body assembled in South Africa after the end of apartheid “in 1995 to help heal the country and bring about a reconciliation of its people by uncovering the truth about human rights violations that had occurred during the period of apartheid.”
  On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the emancipation of enslaved Africans during the third year of the War between the States. June 19, 1865, better known as  Juneteenth, was closer to the time that slaves were freed. On January 16, 1865, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Order, No. 15 (series 1865), which “provided for the confiscation of 400,000 acres (1,600 km2) of land along the Atlantic coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida and the dividing of it into parcels of not more than 40 acres (0.16 km2), on which were to be settled approximately 18,000 formerly enslaved families and other black people then living in the area.”
   On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by an ardent white supremacist named John Wilkes Booth in the Ford Theatre in Washington, DC. Notorious segregationist Andrew Johnson was sworn into the presidency on April 14, 1865. On May 1865, he promptly rescinded all field orders (series 1865), and pardoned white Southern planters, paving the way for these planters to reclaim seized land.
   The turbulent era, known as Reconstruction following the Civil War, which spanned from 1865 to 1877, has been well documented by historians. Famed Harvard English professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., wrote, produced, and narrated one of the best depictions in his PBS series by the same name. It depicted how black political and economic advances during the wake of abolition were intentionally obstructed by racist whites. Whites who did not want to recognize former slaves and their progeny as full citizens with equal rights. The largely successful efforts led to institutionalized barriers that hindered blacks from creating wealth; access to health, education and welfare (in the broad not programmatic sense); and, employment opportunities for 143 years, which is only 7 generations.
   African Americans in America have never gotten their forty acres and a mule. And the time worn, hackneyed playbook of parading out successful blacks, as if these statistically insignificant examples are the rule rather than the exception to white supremacy, is the type of fallacious dichotomy with which many whites engage routinely to rationalize their own implicit bias. I cannot recount the indignities I have experienced with white [female] academicians rudely, unprofessionally, and presumptuously barging into my classes unannounced to attempt to dress me down, question my credentials, or take me to task for some real or, probably, perceived grievance in front of my students. Their misconduct was invariably condoned -- typically by a black female (and sometimes male) HR or diversity administrator hired and trotted out to act as an apologist, a bulwark, a firewall, insulating lily-white college executives from actionable allegations of discrimination. My experiences are not isolated.
   The events surrounding the death of George Floyd have brought these issues into stark relief. And evidence that America needs a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. One that honestly talks about the painful vestiges of discrimination, which still linger in America: Creating an environment where four police officers sworn to uphold the law, stand idly by, or help hold down a man in restraints, as another one brutally suffocates him; like he is little more than a rabid animal, needing to be put down, by positioning and repositioning his knee into the man's neck, until George Floyd gave up the ghost. This Truth and Reconciliation Commission should be comprised of a representative cross-section of Americans with socioeconomic views defining a diverse gamut of sociopolitical perspectives.  It should come up with tangible, binding policies address pernicious public health issues, which disproportionately lead to black faces in public spaces being murdered for dubious, alleged criminal offenses that whites are cited and released on a routine basis.