Kneeling won’t end police violence in America

In one video, a gang of burly white men patrol the streets of Philadelphia carrying baseball bats, an unsettling echo of white supremacist vigilantism. In another clip, police punch an Aussie cameraman and lob tear gas to clear peaceful protesters from the streets of America’s capital. In another, a cop in riot gear pushes an old white man who is trying to talk to him, so that he stumbles, falls down and doesn’t get up, his head bleeding. Dozens of police then walk past him.

You could watch an endlessly varied set of moments from the US protests and reach different conclusions from each one. One video shows a black protester waylaying a black looter as he pulls open the door of a boarded-up Zara in New York. The protester tackles him to the ground, screaming: “You are not an ally!” In another, a black woman is torn between fury and tears as she recounts how a black man pulled a gun on her while she and several other black women cleaned up their neighbourhood from a night’s rioting.

In another, a group of white people kneel to a group of black people to ask forgiveness for slavery. In another, a mixed group of protesters kneel while a black man delivers an oration on how he loves everyone, including the riot police lined up to confront them, after which

Gesture politics: British protesters ‘take the knee’ in Trafalgar Square, London the police arrest him for no apparent reason. In one short report by a Buzzfeed journalist, a black protester argues with four black policemen, one of the cops telling him: “Everybody is not the same. That’s what you have to realise. You don’t know where I come from.”

The internet is awash with trauma and rage. If the US is the great democracy we hope it is, the devastation will lead to laws that stop police getting away with abuse. It will bring on a reckoning with the all-powerful police unions that relentlessly protect violent, malicious officers like Derek Chauvin, whose alleged murder of George Floyd was just the crowning horror in a career generating 18 complaints. It will result in institutional reform and the rejection of categories based on skin colour.

The way there, I suspect, is not via extreme gestures of reverse-subjugation like white people kneeling to black people or British police kneeling to crowds of protesters. It certainly isn’t via looting or using the military to “dominate” peaceful protesters. It can move forwards only through practical measures and debate.

The world looks to the US to show that democracy works. It’s an idea that needs proving, over and over.