THE man who defaced the plinth of the Arthur Ashe statue on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, remonstrated to passers-by “Don’t all lives matter?” Why should the Black Lives Matter movement have the upper hand when it comes to spray-painting slogans, he wanted to know. “Everybody matters, right?” he asked.

But that’s not what he wrote on the Ashe statue.

He wrote: “White Lives Matter.”

As armed militias become an increasingly ominous presence on the streets of America, the meaning of White Lives Matter is abundantly obvious: white lives matter more than black or brown lives; more than immigrant lives. And for those in the white supremacist movement, encouraged by the Trump administration to emerge from the shadows, it means “only white lives matter.”

The decision to place a statue of Ashe, an African American tennis great and Richmond, Virginia native, on Monument Avenue itself was the cause of fierce debate.

Lined with military leaders from the Confederate side during America’s Civil War, the city’s black mayor at the time proclaimed it no place for Ashe, alongside “traitors who fought against human freedom.”

Others thought Ashe would be a beacon of inclusivity, a counterpoint to the line-up of those determined to uphold the cruel sufferings of slavery endured by Ashe’s forebears.

Now Ashe’s Monument Avenue Confederate neighbours are coming down. One by one. But the discriminatory legacy of slavery has never really gone away. Nor will the symbolic removal of statues erase it overnight. As South Africa’s first black president, the late Nelson Mandela, reminded us in the title of his memoir, we are on a “long walk to freedom.”

A very long walk. The physical shackles of slavery may have been removed, but the knee of oppression rests firmly on the necks of African Americans in the 21st-century version of our ever more Disunited States of America.

In the past few weeks, we have witnessed not only the horror of the avoidable killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brookes, but we have listened to one account after another of discriminatory abuse suffered by black Americans from every walk of life, often simply going about their daily affairs.

No-one who is black in America is immune. That includes Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, who is in charge of prosecuting the four police officers responsible for Floyd’s death.

He recalled an episode from his childhood, growing up in a middle class African-American neighbourhood of Detroit, when he was sent to pick up his father’s car from a mechanic’s garage, only to find it had been broken into. He called the cops. But when they arrived, “they put guns on me,” he told the Washington Post. “They threw me in the car, handcuffed me and took me in. . . . it was the dumbest thing ever.”

And potentially lethal. On CNN, African-American commentator Van Jones explained why Brookes may have made what turned out to be the suicidal decision to run when placed under arrest after trying to sleep off intoxication in his car at a Wendy’s fast food joint in Atlanta.

“He made a dumb mistake” with credit card fraud, Jones explained, which had put Brookes on probation. The probation system is “so punitive, so unforgiving,” said Jones, that “any little thing you do wrong, you wind up back in prison.” Being discovered drunk in public, “he knew he was going to go back to prison for that.” He was running, Jones said, “because he didn’t want to lose his liberty over something so small. Instead he lost his life.”

Garrett Rolfe, the police officer who shot Brookes, then kicked him while he lay dying, could also lose his life. With 11 charges against him, including murder, he could face the death penalty if convicted. But the prevailing view is that getting a conviction at all in any of these cases will be an uphill battle against entrenched jury bias that invariably favours the police over the victim.

Ellison, also a former Congressman and civil rights campaigner, recalled in an interview with a Detroit television station, that “it’s only been about 55 years that we have not had state-sanctioned suppression of black people. Only about 55 years. And since that time, we’ve had disparities in every aspect of American life: from police, criminal justice, incarceration, education, economics, jobs, housing, everything. And so we have yet to really reach that ‘liberty and justice for all’ goal.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is the curator and editor of Beyond Nuclear International — @BeyondNuclear.