好英语网“把你们的膝盖从我们的脖子上拿开”
Get your knee off our necks.
把你们的膝盖从我们的脖子上拿开。
Marcus Delespinasse, weary-eyed, stands on Broadway in the late afternoon. “The culture of America,” he tells me after I approached him on the street, “is that it’s OK to treat blacks this way. That cop knew George Floyd would not make it. He still kept his knee there.”
一脸疲惫的马库斯·德莱斯皮纳斯(Marcus Delespinasse)站在午后的百老汇大街上。“这就是美国的文化，”他对上前跟他交谈的我说，“这样对待黑人是可以的。那个警察知道乔治·弗洛伊德(George Floyd)不行了。他的膝盖还是压在那儿。”
Yes, Derek Chauvin, who has been charged with second-degree murder, kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes. A powerful white man asphyxiating a powerless black man, a scene with a long American history, part of the nation’s iconography. Chauvin was a training officer for the other cops at the scene. His blithe expression said, “Watch me kill.”
是的，被控二级谋杀的德雷克·肖万(Derek Chauvin)用膝盖压着弗洛伊德的脖子将近9分钟。一个掌握权力的白人男子令一个无力的黑人男子窒息而死，这样的场景在美国历史中早已有之，是这个国家形象的一部分。肖万是现场其他警察的教官。他愉快的表情仿佛在说：“看看我怎么杀人。”
周四，抗议者在布鲁克林卡德曼广场公园高喊口号。
“Get your knee off our necks,” is the Rev. Al Sharpton’s phrase for the uprising of 2020. The “knee” has been there for a while. It was in the Constitution’s three-fifths clause that set the census value of a slave at 60 percent of a free human being. The “knee” is slavery and Jim Crow and lynching and segregation in schools and transportation and neighborhoods and on and on and on through all the inflections of systemic state oppression of African-Americans that allowed Chauvin to believe he had the right as a white man to do what he did.
“把你的膝盖从我们脖子上拿下来，”阿尔·夏普顿牧师(Rev. Al Sharpton)用这样一句话归纳2020年的这场反抗运动。这个“膝盖”已经存在多时了。它就在宪法的“五分之三条款”中，规定奴隶在人口普查中算60%的自由人。“膝盖”是奴隶制、吉姆·克劳(Jim Crow)法和私刑，是学校、交通工具和社区等各种地方的种族隔离，各种对非裔美国人的系统性政权压迫的变种，让肖万相信，身为一个白人男性，他有权做他所做的这件事。
“Being black in America should not be a death sentence,” Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, the liberal city where Floyd was killed, said. He had to say that more than a half-century after the civil rights movement. Think about it.
“在美国，身为黑人不应意味着被判死刑，”弗洛伊德被杀时所在的自由派城市明尼阿波利斯的市长雅各布·弗雷(Jacob Frey)说。民权运动结束已经半个多世纪了，如今他还要这样说。想想看吧。
Get your knee off our necks.
把你的膝盖从我们脖子上拿开。
Aged 52 and unemployed, Delespinasse is black. I feel despair as I write that sentence. So-and-so is white. So-and-so is black. All those parentheses running through copy, the refrain of failure. To explain what exactly? America’s societal fracture; America’s original sin; America’s shame that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have never been equally afforded its citizens. I might have written: Aged 52 and unemployed, Delespinasse is a human being. The likes of Chauvin still cannot see that.
德莱斯皮纳斯52岁，无业，是一个黑人。当我写下这句话时，我感到绝望。某某人是白人。某某人是黑人。这样的形容到处都是，一再重复着失败。这到底能够解释什么？这是美国的社会断裂；美国的原罪；生命、自由和对幸福的追求从未被平等地赋予公民，这是美国的耻辱。我可能应该这样写：德莱斯皮纳斯52岁，失业，是一个人。像肖万这样的人仍然不懂得这一点。
“You look at that video and think that could be me, or my cousin, or my uncle,” Delespinasse tells me. “Police have impunity. No wonder young people are enraged. That cop with his knee resting there sums up the savageness of white apathy.”
“看着视频，会觉得那个人可能是我，或者是我的表哥、我的叔叔，”德莱斯皮纳斯告诉我。“警察没有受到惩罚。难怪年轻人会被激怒。那个用膝盖压着脖子的警察象征着白人冷漠的残暴。”
Delespinasse looks out with those weary eyes on a ghostly New York. First the hum-and-honking of the city gave way to pandemic-induced silence interspersed with ambulance sirens. Now, after the looting, the sound of New York is the screeching of electric saws cutting plywood to board up broken windows and the rumbling bursts of electric screwdrivers fixing the panels in place. This is the audio of a great city’s disaster. This is the audio of a virus that sharpened the inequities of American dysfunction.
德莱斯皮纳斯用疲倦的眼睛望着空荡荡的纽约。先是城市的喧嚣变成了大流行造成的寂静，夹杂着救护车的警报声。现在，打砸过后，纽约的声音变成了电锯切割胶合板、给破碎的窗户钉上木板的刺耳声音，还有电动螺丝刀固定面板时发出的隆隆声。这是一个大城市的灾难之音。这是加剧美国机能失调不平等的病毒之音。
Get your knee off our necks.
把你们的膝盖从我们的脖子上拿开。
There is no right to pillage and burn in the United States. But human beings will react to entrenched state violence, in extreme cases a license to kill, which is what black Americans have confronted for centuries. All that is needed for rebellion against relentless oppression is a spark. What happens to a dream deferred, asked Langston Hughes? “Does it explode?”
在美国，你没有掠夺和焚烧的权利。但人类会对根深蒂固的、在极端情况下会成为杀人许可证的国家暴力做出反应，这是美国黑人几个世纪以来一直面临的问题。要反抗无情的压迫，你所需要的只是一个火花。被搁置的梦想会变成什么样？兰斯顿·休斯(Langston Hughes)问道。“它会爆炸吗？”
The savageness of white apathy: a striking phrase, and sometimes it is worse than apathy. Consider Amy Cooper, that highly educated white woman caught on video in Central Park. She found herself saying she would tell the police there is “an African-American man threatening my life.” Because a black man, Christian Cooper (no relation), an avid birder, had properly asked her to leash her dog. It’s important to call such racist aggression by its name.
白人冷漠的残暴：一个令人震惊的词，而有时的情况，比冷漠更糟糕。比如艾米·库珀(Amy Cooper)，那个受过高等教育的白人女性在中央公园被拍下了视频。她说她会告诉警察，“有个非裔美国人威胁我的生命”。这只是因为一个名叫克里斯蒂安·库珀（Christian Cooper，两人无亲缘关系）的黑人，一个观鸟爱好者，礼貌地要求她把自己的狗拴起来。对于这种种族主义的侵犯行为，必须正确地为它定性是十分重要的。
Those impulses are what President Trump, a racist who launched his successful campaign in 2015 by calling Mexicans entering the country “rapists,” plays on. Violence and division are his elements. He has no other. Hence his recent threat to deploy the military to quash “domestic terror,” his repeated talk of “domination,” his encouragement to violence couched in endless references to Second Amendment rights, and his tweeting support for Senator Tom Cotton, a prominent Republican, who called in a tweet for the deployment of “10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry — whatever it takes to restore order.”
特朗普总统所利用的正是这样的冲动。作为一个种族主义者，特朗普在2015年发起成功的竞选活动，靠的是将进入美国的墨西哥人称为“强奸犯”。暴力和分裂是他的基本元素，没有别的东西。所以他最近威胁要部署军队，镇压“国内的恐怖”，他反复用“驾驭”这个词，他没完没了地引用第二修正案的权利，表达对暴力的鼓励，他还发推支持参议员汤姆·科顿(Tom Cotton)，这位地位显赫的共和党人发推呼吁调遣“第10山地师、第82空降师、第1骑兵师、第3步兵师——不惜一切代价恢复秩序。”
Whatever it takes to do what? To stop the lawbreakers and looters, Trump and Cotton would say with breathtaking disingenuousness. The military is not needed for that.
不惜一切代价去做什么？特朗普和科顿会以惊人的虚伪说，去阻止不法分子和抢劫者。这些不需要动用军队。
No, the point would be this: to assert with a great show of force, after the slow-motion murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, that the oppressive system that produced this act is not about to change and armed white male power in America is inviolable. That is Trump’s fundamental credo. His Bible-brandishing, American Gothic portrait this week outside St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington is one of the most disturbing portraits of psychopathic self-importance seen since 1933.
不，他们的目的应该是这样：在乔治·弗洛伊德被一名白人警察以慢镜头般的动作杀害之后，他们想通过大规模展示武力来宣告，产生这种行为的压迫性制度不会改变，美国白人男性的权力是不可侵犯的。这是特朗普的基本信条。本周在华盛顿圣约翰圣公会教堂外，他挥舞圣经，描绘了一幅哥特式的美国肖像，这是自1933年以来最令人不安的病态自大肖像之一。
Get your knee off our necks — and American democracy.
把你们的膝盖从我们的脖子上拿开——从美国民主上拿开。
Trump was widely dismissed in 2015. He was dismissed in 2016, for that matter, until he won. A fringe loony, he would burn out. Turned out tens of millions of Americans thought like him.
特朗普在2015年被普遍无视。其实在2016年依然被无视，直到他获得胜利。一个走在边缘的疯子，是会慢慢耗尽的。结果我们发现，其实有数千万美国人和他有着同样的想法。
Cotton followed up on his tweet with his now infamous send-in-the-troops Op-Ed in The New York Times. The piece was wrong, repugnant, mistimed and flawed. It was also extremely relevant and very dangerous to ignore. I prefer to read it and vote with rage than experience again, in November, the consequences of complacent liberal ignorance.
科顿在自己的Twitter上再次贴出了他在《纽约时报》上那篇现在已经声名狼藉的“派兵”专栏文章。那是一篇错漏百出、不合时宜的文章。但同时它也非常重要，忽视它将是非常危险的。我宁愿读过它，然后带着愤怒去投票，也不愿在11月再次经历自由派的自满无知所造成的后果。