George Floyd’s violent murder captured America’s attention. Will systemic anti-Black racism?
Water is dropping from a leaky faucet.
This article was published on Medium on June 4th, 2020.
This movement is bigger than one name. It is comprised of not only the dozens of familiar names that follow hashtags, it includes every person who experiences the inherently unjust experience of being Black in America. Many people have characterized the civil rights demonstrations as a response to the murder of George Floyd, and while it certainly is, it also serves as a long overdue reaction to broader dynamics of anti-Black racism and white supremacy.
From Emmet Till, to Oscar Grant, to Breonna Taylor — we have made it a point to say the names of Black people who have been unjustly murdered at the hands of white people. Over the past few years these incidents have trickled into and out of most American’s lives, like a leaky faucet that’s annoying enough to notice but not pervasive enough to spend the time and resources necessary to fix. This metaphorical leak had to flood the place before people recognized that it could no longer be ignored.
This is what George Floyd’s death represents in the context of the movement we are currently witnessing. American’s minds were flooded with a graphic depiction of a man slowly losing his life at the hands of law enforcement, and that provided a lot of people with the realization that this incident of police brutality against George Floyd is a situation that needs to be fixed immediately. Unfortunately, if not properly contextualized, this outrage might overshadow the systemic issues that lie underneath.
There have been a lot of videos. As a brilliant Black colleague recently pointed out to me, the reaction to George Floyd’s murder is a reminder that the video of Philando Castile’s murder was not enough. The cell phone video that captured the murder of Ahmaud Arbery was not enough. Atatiana Jefferson being killed in her own home during a “wellness check” was not enough. The constant videos over the years of white people calling the police on Black people going about their everyday lives was not enough to wake people up to the urgency of systemic anti-Black racism.
If you look into any of the victims of murder that are named in this article, you will find concerted efforts to blame them, from toxicology reports, to theories about what they may have been doing to “get themselves into that situation.” When people learn of racism against Black people, their first reaction is often to figure out how what happened wasn’t racist, they look for factors that could provide a more convenient explanation that serves to provide comfort by minimizing the pervasiveness of racism. Even in George Floyd’s case there are people scrambling to somehow blame his death on something other than the nine minute chokehold under the police officer’s knee.
For our society to reckon with white supremacy in a meaningful way, it took the most egregious and gruesome depiction of police brutality being shown to the masses. A depiction so graphic and heinous that even well known racists like Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh have called it murder. Opponents to racial justice have moved quickly to acknowledge the murder of George Floyd before the inevitable “but” that precedes their critique of civil rights demonstrators’ direct action. Some have latched onto a narrative that the protests dishonor George Floyd. The LAPD police chief went so far as to say that the demonstrations that have taken place as a reaction to George Floyd’s murder are somehow responsible for his death.
These reactions are based on the misunderstanding that the protests are solely about George Floyd’s death at the hands of police officers. This interpretation serves to minimize the pervasiveness of systemic racism. It ignores how systemic racism impacts Black folks in other areas, including healthcare, employment, and government. It narrows our focus to police brutality against Black men, and draws attention away from the ways that Black women, trans, and non-binary individuals are victimized, evidenced by the lack of coverage as Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade’s murderers still walk the streets.
It will do us a disservice if we allow George Floyd’s murder to be characterized as an extreme example of police brutality. It is obvious that the heinous depiction of his murder was a necessary catalyst to revealing the overbearing presence of white supremacy and anti-Black racism, but it certainly is not an anomaly. If we want our efforts to eliminate these systems of oppression to be successful, we need to maintain a broad focus that recognizes the way that George Floyd’s murder fits into larger dynamics of white supremacy.
