Floyd’s death spurs query: How much they matter
For 12-yearold Tamir Rice, it was simply carrying a toy handgun. For Eric Garner, it was allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes. For Michael Brown, Sandra Bland and Ahmaud Arbery, it was the minor offenses of jaywalking, failing to signal a lane change and trespassing on a residential construction site.
And for George Floyd, it was an accusation he used a fake $20 bill at a grocery store. While in police custody on May 25, Floyd repeatedly pleaded “I can’t breathe,” as a white officer in Minneapolis pressed his knee into the black man’s neck for what prosecutors say was nearly nine minutes.
“George wasn’t hurting anyone that day,” his brother, Philonise Floyd, said Wednesday in testimony to a House Judiciary Committee hearing on policing practices and law enforcement accountability.
“He didn’t deserve to die over $20. I am asking you, is that what a black man’s life is worth?”
Twenty dollars: To some, that’s chump change. But George Floyd was not a chump, family and friends in Houston, where he grew up, asserted when they laid him to rest this week in a golden coffin. Those who mourned him at memorials held across three states said the value of the 46-year-old’s life far surpassed that.
In death, Floyd has created an invaluable and, some say, unprecedented moment for the national struggle against institutional racism and inequality.
In Minnesota, across the nation and around the world, outrage turned into action as protests grew, propelled by the reality that African Americans become martyrs of the Black Lives Matter movement over such trivial activities — in circumstances where their rights are discarded, their liberty deprived, their lives devalued. And where they’re far more likely than whites to die at the hands of police.
“What’s exposed in this moment is something black folks have always known: How quickly we can be killed by law enforcement over the most trivial things,” said Chelsea Fuller, spokesperson for the Movement for Black Lives, a national coalition of more than 150 black-led grassroots organizations seeking the liberation of black people.
“This is now clear as day to everyone, including white people, and we all need to face that the solution to this endemic problem won’t be quick or easy, but it is urgent and necessary,” she said in a statement.
For some who now seek change, the fix starts with reforming police departments and the U.S. criminal justice system. Others favor a deeper reckoning to address centuriesold assumptions that black lives hold only a fraction of the value placed on the rights, liberty, lives and property of the white majority in America.
“Human life (does not equal) 20 bucks,” read a protest sign during a rally last week at the Minnesota Capitol in St. Paul.
A week after Floyd’s death, Miski Noor, an activist with the Twin Cities-based Black Visions Collective, visited the area around Cup Foods, the grocery store at Chicago Avenue and 38th Street where an employee called police to report a man who allegedly bought cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill.
The intersection has become a makeshift memorial, where flowers, teddy bears, candles, artwork and protest signs surround the spot where Floyd breathed his last breath. Floyd’s younger brother, Terrence, stood there on June 1 to urge calm after protests turned to looting and vandalism in cities that included Los Angeles, New York City and San Francisco.
The circumstances of Floyd’s death are “the reason why we have to get at the conversation around anti-blackness,” said Noor, who lives just blocks from the grocery. Noor said the Floyd arrest started over a “store owner in a majority black and (nonwhite) neighborhood who decides a counterfeit 20 is enough to call the police.”
But Jamar Nelson, a spokesman for the owners of Cup Foods, said it was important to recognize who is responsible for Floyd’s death.
“We do our community a huge disservice if we continue to focus on the call and not how police officers have a reckless disregard for the lives of black and brown men,” he said.
Echoing that sentiment, Mahmoud “Mike” Abumayyaleh, co-owner of the grocery, attended the Minneapolis memorial for Floyd wearing a Tshirt that read, “We can’t breathe,” a reference to the man’s last words under the knee of Officer Derek Chauvin. The officer, who has since been fired, is charged with seconddegree murder.
Various studies of criminal justice data show that African Americans are far more likely than whites to be pulled over by police, and are as much as three times more likely to be searched.