Vijay Prashad and Jeneé Osterheldt

The Murder of George Floyd Is Normal in an Abnormal Society

Vijay Prashad

There is no need to wonder why George Floyd (age 46) was murdered in broad daylight in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25, 2020. The script of his death is written deep in the ugly drama of U.S. history.

I Can’t Breathe 2020

Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee sat on George Floyd’s neck for two minutes and 53 seconds. After that time, George Floyd was dead. From the moment Chauvin put his body on an unarmed man, George Floyd said—eleven times—I can’t breathe.

Scientists who study human respiration say that untrained people can hold their breath from between thirty seconds and two minutes; anything more than that results in a process that leads eventually to death.

I Can’t Breathe 2014

Officer Daniel Pantaleo slammed Eric Garner onto the New York City sidewalk just minutes after Garner had helped resolve a dispute on the street. Pantaleo pushed Garner’s face onto the pavement, and Garner said—eleven times—I can’t breathe.

Garner lost consciousness, did not receive medical care in the ambulance, and was pronounced dead soon after arriving at the hospital. He died, effectively, of strangulation.

Dismayed

Both Floyd and Garner were African American; both were men who struggled to make a living in a harsh economic environment.

The UN Human Rights head Michelle Bachelet wrote a powerful statement in response to the death of George Floyd:

“This is the latest in a long line of killings of unarmed African Americans by U.S. police officers and members of the public. I am dismayed to have to add George Floyd’s name to that of Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Michael Brown and many other unarmed African Americans who have died over the years at the hands of the police—as well as people such as Ahmaud Arbery and Trayvon Martin who were killed by armed members of the public.”

Each year in the United States, more than a thousand people are killed by the police; African Americans are three times more likely to be killed by the police than whites, and African Americans who are killed by police are more likely to be unarmed than whites. Most of these killings are not associated with serious crime. Astoundingly, 99 percent of the officers who kill a civilian are not charged with a crime.

Permanent Depression

“The Depression,” the poet Langston Hughes wrote of the 1930s, “brought everybody down a peg or two.” It was different for African Americans, for they “had but few pegs to fall.”

Garner was accused of selling loose cigarettes on the street, violating excise tax laws to make a few dollars; Floyd was accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill. Even if these accusations could have been proved, neither were earth-shattering crimes; if they had gone to court, neither would have earned these men death sentences. They were killed after being accused of minor infringements.

When Hughes wrote those words, Lino Rivera, a 16-year-old Afro-Puerto Rican boy, had been arrested for shoplifting a 10-cent penknife. A crowd gathered when the police went to arrest him, a rumor spread that he had been killed, and Harlem rose up in anger. A government report later showed that the protests were “spontaneous” and that the causes of the unrest were “the injustices of discrimination in employment, the aggressions of the police, and racial segregation.” This report could have been written last week. It suggests a permanent Depression.

System Cannot Be Reformed

Historically, police aggression has come before any unrest. In 1967, unrest in Detroit spurred the U.S. government to study the causes, which they assumed would be communist instigators and an inflammatory press. The riots, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) said,

“were not caused by, nor were they the consequences of, any organized plan or ‘conspiracy.’”

Instead, the Kerner Commission said that the cause of the unrest was structural racism. “What white Americans have never fully understood,” the report noted, “is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” By “ghetto” the report’s authors meant the atrocious class inequalities in the United States that had—because of the history of enslavement—been marked by race.

Rather than address the deep inequalities in society, the American government chose to heavily arm police officers and send them to discipline populations in distress with their dangerous weapons. The commission proposed instead “a policy which combines ghetto enrichment with programs designed to encourage integration… into the society outside the ghetto.”

Nothing came of that report, as nothing has come of any of the reports that stretch backward 150 years. Rather than genuinely invest in the well-being of people, the American government—whether governed by Republicans or Democrats—cut back on social programs and cut back on welfare spending; it allowed firms to erode wages and it allowed them to diminish working conditions. What was terrible in 1968 only became worse for the working-class Black population.

The financial crisis of 2008 stole from African American households’ savings that had been accumulated through generations of work. By 2013, Pew Research found that the net worth of white households was 13 times greater than African American households; this was the largest such gap since 1989, and it is a gap that has only widened. Now, with the global pandemic striking the United States particularly hard, data shows that the disease has struck African Americans and other people of color the most. Some of this is because it is African Americans and other people of color who often have the most dangerous frontline jobs.

If Eric Garner and George Floyd earned a minimum wage of $25 for decent work, would they need to be in a position where a belligerent police officer would accuse them of selling loose cigarettes or of passing a counterfeit bill?

They Are Normal

Society in the United States has been broken by the mechanisms of high rates of economic inequality, high rates of poverty, impossible entry into robust educational systems, and remarkable warlike conditions put in place to manage populations no longer seen as the citizenry but as criminals.

Such processes corrode a civilization. The names of Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice… and now George Floyd are only the names of the present moment, written in thick ink on cardboard signs across the United States at the many, many protests that continue to take place. The taste of desperation lingers in these protests, along with the anger at the system, and the outrage seems to have no outlet.

Donald Trump is an exaggeration of the normal course of history in the United States. He takes the ugliness to the utmost limit, bringing in the army, sniffing around for the legal possibility of the mass detention of demonstrators. His is a politics of violence. It does not last long. It is hard to beat the urge for justice out of an entire people.

As you read this, somewhere in the United States, another person will be killed—another poor person whom the police deem to be a threat. Tomorrow another will be killed; and then another. These deaths are normal for the system. Outrage against this system is a logical, and moral, response.

(Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist.)

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It’s Bigger Than Buildings. America Is Burning.

Jeneé Osterheldt

Update: Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who knelt on George Floyd before he died, was charged Friday with third-degree murder and manslaughter.

A Minneapolis police precinct was on fire. But I saw my people in the flames.

“When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” Donald Trump threatened. He meant it.

George Floyd was killed and no one was arrested. And they want me to care about that burning building with not one officer in it. You can rebuild a station. There is no resurrection for the dead Black bodies.

George Floyd’s killing was on camera. We only cared because we saw him beg for his life and cry for his mama as Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck. He knelt on his neck, while having a record as a police officer littered with nearly 20 complaints, with the conviction of someone determined to put Floyd in his place, beneath him.

And no one arrested that man. That precinct represented his house. It’s gone now. Everyone says it’s a rare sight. I wish dead Black bodies were the shocker. Now, Trump is saying the National Guard will “get the job done right.” All I can think about is whether Black people will be safe?

In 2018, Philadelphia Eagles fans tore up their city, looting, flipping cars, and starting fires after a Super Bowl win. Trump didn’t threaten them.

Guns instead of grace is an attitude reserved for Black folk.

Friday morning, live on CNN, we saw how state patrol controlled the crowd. We watched Omar Jimenez, an Afro-Latino journalist, be arrested despite identifying himself. They surrounded him, hands on his arms as he spoke. The same did not happen to a white broadcaster. This is America.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev blew up the Boston Marathon. James Holmes shot up a Colorado theater. Dylann Roof committed a terrorist attack at a Charleston church, coldly executing nine Black people as they worshiped. Each of these killers was safely taken into custody.

Everyone keeps talking about the empty police station blazing and the looting. But the lives lost matter. George Floyd is one of many.

In Kentucky, Breonna Taylor was killed by police in March. You don’t say her name because you didn’t see it on camera. You didn’t see it on camera like you saw the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, and the names of so many others. The examples are so plentiful it pains my spirit.

You don’t hear enough about Breonna Taylor, an EMT who was killed after police executed a no-knock warrant at her home in search of a suspect who was already in custody. So protesters are ensuring the world knows her name right now. Remember when a cop killed Atatiana Jefferson in her Texas home last October? What about Botham Jean, do you remember how he died in his home at the hands of a confused cop? We aren’t safe at home and the violence is normalized under the guise of a few bad apples.

We didn’t start the fire. America was founded by firestarters. The thieves of land who also stole people and raped and killed and brutalized their way into power. This country was built on the backs of Black folk it didn’t perceive as human and even today it tries to pillage our souls.

The country had to go to war with itself for us to get free, but it wasn’t liberation. There were still lynchings. Pieces of our bodies were used as souvenirs. Freedom came with Jim Crow laws to keep us fighting for equality. There was redlining and segregation and all kinds of legal ways to limit our lives that still affect us today. The March on Selma was only 55 years ago. The Civil Rights Movement is not yet a senior citizen. They say we’ve come so far, but our people in Flint still don’t have clean water.

They say we’re free while waging the War on Drugs that fueled mass incarceration and building the school-to-prison pipeline to profit off us. Look closely at welfare programs of the Johnson and Nixon era — marriage was discouraged if you needed help. And in that time, we were still fighting for basic rights. This country helped destroy Black families — first by selling them away from one another and then by making their split essential to economic survival.

Sometimes, I think you hate us, America. You always did. Yet we’re expected to be in perfect peace. They say vote, march, turn the other cheek.

So yeah, buildings are burning in Minneapolis. Just like when y’all burned Tulsa and Rosewood, except — wait a minute — those were massacres. Our deaths never meant a thing to this system. Brutality never subsided. We just have smartphones now.

I hate that the livelihood of business owners is burning. But so are Black lives. And we know America’s love language is money.

So when lost profits mount, maybe leaders will look at the hate they give us and reconsider. Maybe they’ll understand what Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey meant when he said, though the destruction is unacceptable, “the symbolism of a building cannot outweigh the importance of life.”

Or maybe they’ll try to pacify us with a Martin Luther King Jr. quote and remind us about his dedication to nonviolence and his anti-rioting stance. They’ll forget about the time he said this:

I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear?

King understood the root cause of the rage we see. But they will forget that he was radical like that. They’ll also forget that he was killed.

Colin Kaepernick can’t play football anymore because he took a knee to protest brutality. But we haven’t arrested the guy who took a knee on a Black man’s neck. How is that not a recipe for unrest? You know what Floyd said as he clung to his last breaths?

(Jeneé Osterheldt is a US based culture writer who covers identity and social justice through the lens of culture and the arts.)