“I can’t breathe.”
The final, haunting words of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man who was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, eerily reflects the plight of present day America. These words have become a resounding cry of protest, as America collectively fights to breathe, to salvage its social fabric and values of life, liberty, and equal protection of the laws, enumerated in the 14th Amendment.
The distressing footage was rapidly disseminated on social media, depicting Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes whilst three other police officers stood by, is an image that will prevail for decades to come. This footage is in stark juxtaposition to images of athletes and other high-profile individuals kneeling during the American national anthem, as a symbol of protest against the high levels of discrimination and inequality that African-Americans face.
This death is off the back of the killing of Ahmed Aubrey, an African American man that was killed in February by two white men who gunned him down as he was jogging. It took two months, a viral video and continued calls for justice for the men to eventually be charged with murder. Cases such as these, amongst many others, serves as testament to the fact that institutional and systemic racism is a reality that did not decrease or disappear with constitutional or legislative reform in favour of racial equality.
Soon after the death of George Floyd, protests erupted in Minneapolis, quickly spreading to other parts of the United States, with many areas declaring curfews and states of civil emergency in an attempt to bring the situation under control, with the National Guard being deployed in Minneapolis.
An Escalating Crisis
“What’s really interesting about what’s happening in America right now is that a lot of people don’t seem to realise how dominos connect…how one piece knocks another piece, that knocks another piece, and then in the end it creates a giant wave”.
This powerful statement by Trevor Noah, as part of a monologue in response to George Floyd’s death concisely summarises the situation in America. Centuries of inequality, with one manifestation in police brutality, combined with COVID-19, created a perfect storm for challenging an orthodoxy that consented to institutional and systemic abuse of African-Americans.
Whilst the African-American community in the US comprises 13 percent of the population, they are killed by police twice as much as white Americans. Qualitative, or perception based analysis is also important in evincing the deep racial divide, with 70 percent of white police officers in the US believing that these were just isolated incidents with no connection to a broader systemic issue. However, the protests currently occurring demonstrate that these are not just isolated incidents.
Many viral videos on various social media platforms, featuring ‘BBQ Becky’, and more recently, Amy Cooper, have demonstrated that calling the police on African-Americans is more detrimental, a factor that many white Americans are aware of, given the higher risk of confrontation that they are likely to have with police. As Trevor Noah puts it, there is a pre-existing “presumption of guilt because of your blackness”.
The deep-rooted racial inequality that is present between white Americans and African Americans has been sardonically captured in an old adage: “When white folks catch a cold, black folks get pneumonia.” This phrasing is unfortunately all too fitting for the COVID-19 crisis, with the mortality rate for African-Americans being 2.4 times higher than it is for white Americans, and this translates to a death rate of 1:1850 African-Americans to 1:4400 white Americans. Indisputably, the African-American community has been affected disproportionately compared to their white counterparts, with one-third of COVID-19 deaths being African-American.
Whilst underlying issues, including health conditions, environment and poverty is one aspect of this overrepresentation in mortality, a study showed that African-Americans seeking treatment for COVID-19 were six times more likely to be rejected than white Americans. This is essentially, as many commentators have labelled, ‘death by racism’, and has no significant difference to deaths in custody/through police brutality.
All of these factors combined stoked the growing frustration over inequity and entrenched racism, and these protests are a materialiation of this.
Shifting of Blame, Diversions and Double Standards
In addition to exposing the deep social divide in the US, the protests have also manifested the vehement resentment towards institutions of authority and law enforcement that have played a role in racial abuse against African-Americans. This was evident through the destruction and vandalism of several buildings symbolic of this authority, including the burning of a Minneapolis police station and a Louisville court building, and protests in front of the White House, forcing it to go into temporary lockdown.
In a series of tweets, President Donald J. Trump labelled the protests in Minnesota as a “total lack of leadership”, and substituting the word “protesters” for “rioters” praised the US Secret Service, who were stationed in front of the White House, for “quickly com[ing] down on them.”. He went as far to state that “when the looting starts, the shooting start”, a phrase with a racially charged history and coined by Miami Police Chief Walter Headley in 1967. His speech at Florida’s Kennedy Space Station was labelled as vastly insensitive and inflammatory, with “rioters, looters and anarchists” being said to have “dishonoured” the memory of George Floyd, going on to blame “Antifa and other radical leftwing groups” for doing nothing toward the attainment of justice and peace. However, this can be seen as a diversionary tactic, to shift blame and detract from wider social issues and institutional racism, and allow the issue of police brutality to settle into obscurity and become the new normal.
As another diversionary tactic, there has been an insurgence against the demonstrations seeking justice for George Floyd, with a man loading a bow and shooting it at protestors in Utah, stating “All Lives Matter”, referencing the Black Lives Matter movement which arose some years prior in response to police brutality against the African-American community. Furthermore, the hashtag “All Lives Matter” garnered over 78,000 tweets as of the 27th of May.
Many commentators have drawn attention to the noticeable differences in the way the current protests, and the protests opposing the COVID-19 lockdowns, were addressed by police. Whilst the lockdown protestors were carrying guns and attempted to storm a building, no weapons or tear gas was used – which when posed in juxtaposition to the response to the current protests, exposes a clear double standard.
The prevailing sentiment is that race played a significant factor in this, and as US politics expert Dr. David Smith from the University of Sydney suggests, “Police tend to respond very differently to armed black people from the way they respond to armed white people, they are much more likely to see armed black people as a threat.”
Whilst it is yet to be seen whether these protests are the catalyst of a broader social change movement, the arrest of Derek Chauvin is in some ways cathartic, and provides a temporary sense of justice. Nevertheless, the unfolding scenes in America uncannily harks back to Childish Gambino’s music video ‘This is America’, and creates an atmosphere of apprehension, as the lyrics “Police be trippin’ now” rings true now in more ways than one.
