US’ Brutal ‘Floyd’ Killing : Lessons Unlearnt, As Institutional Racism Continues! 

By Mohamed Harees –JUNE 4, 2020

Lukman Harees

George Floyd yelled ‘I can’t breathe’ and was begging for his life, when the white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin looking calm and devoid of pity continued to  keep his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes until he sadly departed from the so-called land of the ‘free’. ‘The banality of evil incarnate’, as LA Times writer Kareem A. Jabbar called it. The other Policemen too did not help this man begging for his life; this becoming accomplices and partners in this dastardly crime. Upon public outcries, days later Derek was arrested, charged with 3rd degree murder (not 1st degree). His murder evoked painful memories of the 2014 murder of Eric Garner who also underwent similar trauma in the hands of the Police. As George Clooney said, there is no vaccine for racism pandemic! 

What happened to Floyd wasn’t however an isolated incident The fragility of blackness hangs over all over America, with the fence meant to guard the crop eating them- meaning the raw bias of the Police force by acting as the racist perpetrators instead of being protectors of citizen’s rights. Black lives never mattered there.  Recently as close as in February, Ahmaud Arbery was out jogging when he was fatally shot by two white men in Georgia while in March, Breonna Taylor was fatally shot during a police drug raid in her Kentucky apartment; drugs were never found. And then last month, a black boy was thrown to the ground and repeatedly punched by a police officer in Rancho Cordova, a city in the Sacramento metro area. And just last week, a Louisiana police officer was fired for commenting on a Facebook post that it was unfortunate more black people didn’t die from the coronavirus.

As the Mayor of Minneapolis himself said in the aftermath: “Being a Black man in America should not be a death sentence.” This is what millions of Americans think. And tens of thousands have taken to the streets to make the point. People came out in greater numbers on the streets  as protests rippled across the country as they expressed their indignation by shutting down highways, sleeping on the streets handcuffed and marching with fury, lighting fireworks, and setting buildings and cars on fire. Of course, frustration turned into vandalism and theft. However it is easier to find fault with such  so-called acts of  damage. But the reality has been that Covid has been affecting BME communities disproportionately and for too long the Black Americans have been at the butt end of institutional racism inherent in public institutions, education, the justice system and employment. Thus, lacking perspective is disgusting to say the least. Like what the crackpot Trump is displaying, by asking why so many black people are in the streets, acting with such fury and rage shouting “Hands up, don’t shoot” and “I can’t breathe” as they marched through cities!

Trump expectedly has been making the present explosive situation worse off by the minute. Far from calling for peace, his tweet  about demonstrators outside the White House was atrocious: “Big crowd, professionally organised, but nobody came close to breaching the fence. If they had they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs and the most ominous weapons, I have ever seen. That’s when people would have been badly hurt, at least.”. This stupidity prompted Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo in an interview with CNN to boldly tell Trump,’ if you don’t have something constructive to say, keep your month shut’. Interestingly, looking at rioting and looting with squint eyes, there appears to be double standards too. In 2003, then Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfield at the Pentagon commenting about the behavior of his American troops after the Iraqi invasion, said ‘US forces should not be blamed for the lawlessness and looting in Baghdad as it is a natural consequences of the transition from a dictatorship to a free country. Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. For suddenly the biggest problem in the world to be looting is really notable’. (UPI.com). Isn’t sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander as well?

These types of protests against police brutality erupting across the US over the past few days, leading actually should have led to tough classroom conversations about race, racism, and police violence. And this savagely cruel or depraved behaviour should also serve as another teachable moment not only for the US but the world outside too. However, honestly, all are tired of such teachable moments because it seems like nothing is ever learned. As Aldous Huxley says, “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” 

It was Trump, the symbol of  white Supremacy in the US who exploited  the baser instincts in the minds of marginalized communities through criminalizing blackness and demonization of the ‘other’- the Mexicans,.the Muslims etc etc ; through racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia to come to power. He had his knee on the neck of democracy, being  a product of the American political, judicial, financial and social systems, which are all infected by white supremacy. He was of course continuing the legacy of slavery of Blacks for almost 250 years with an increased tempo. Despite a break in this evil legacy due the Civil Rights Movement, and an election of a black President, shamelessly this legacy continues to-date with the disenfranchisement of black and nonwhite communities remaining the American way. 

 With America hypocritically preaching about liberty, freedom, equality and human rights to the outside world, in home territory however the reality is just the opposite, with white people being socialized to abhor and fear blackness and ‘otherness’, and to view racism as an individual prejudice and not a systemic constraint. Otis R. Taylor Jr. in an article on 01/06/20 in Los Angeles Times quotes, Matthew Kincaid, the founder of Overcoming Racism, an organization that provides racism and equity training in schools, saying ‘that not teaching about racism is part of the problem. “It is a deliberate act to uphold and maintain the structure of white supremacy”. But just teaching about racism alone isn’t enough, because policies written to disadvantage people of color, like voting rights legislation and gerrymandering, are still on the books. Racism is systemic, systematic, and nowhere near gone. White America must step up not just for peace, but for justice.

Many white Americans cannot however admit that racism remains an inherent societal problem and state structures are in dire need of reform to achieve equal treatment for the citizens they purport to serve. This inability of so much of white America to come to terms with its own privilege and empathize with minorities’ experiences is the single largest roadblock to progress and reconciliation. Those who are part of the problem must be part of the solution. People of colour cannot single-handedly change a system that is inherently skewed against them; nor should they be forced to try. If there is to be progress toward eliminating prejudice and racial violence, white Americans must stop being complacent about systemic racism.The underling need before a solution to racism can be implemented, is that the existence of racism must be widely acknowledged.

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