Why do we assume George Floyd murder is about race?
The court has rendered a decision in the killing of George Floyd. Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer, was found guilty of three counts against him in the murder. Good.
But why are we collectively assuming race is the issue here?
History? Perhaps.
What is troubling is how the nation’s reaction highlights a collective imprisonment within the walls of racial catego- ries.
Too many Americans have succumbed to the institutionalized monomania around racial categories being imposed upon them, marring our society for centuries. These sociological categories have done little else than justify enslavement, create cottage industries and keep us divided.
Despite some biological differences between peoples, as DNA sequencing pioneer Craig Venter made plain, “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”
With race being scientifically nonexistent, where do we begin looking at how we got here? A good place to start is The Enlightenment (1650-1800), the period during which people began to order what had been arbitrary ideologies. And what better person than Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant for our point of departure.
Kant, probably best known for his 1784 essay, “What is Enlightenment,” ultimately defined the period. “Dare to know,” he exclaimed; “public use of one’s reason must be free at all times.”
The same man opined that all black Africans had “a thick turned-up nose and sausage lips” due to Africa’s warmer, moister climate. He went on to describe black Africans’ perspiration as having a chemical stench, “which all Negroes stink of.”
Simplistic does not begin to explain it.
One could say Kant’s ostensibly racist views trickled down from Pope Nicholas V (13971455). Though some Catholic edicts would tell a different tale on slavery, Nicholas’ Papal Bull (1452) allowed for sub-Saharan Africans being reduced to slavery. The Pope issued a mandate to the Portuguese king, Alfonso V, and instructed him “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever … and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” Saracens were Arabs or Muslims.
This and other ideas fed slavers’ cravings for an acceptability to justify their enterprise, racializing our world.
Charles Darwin, greatly influenced by his Enlightenment era predecessors, wrote in “The Descent of Man” (1845) that “there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether [people] should be classed as a single species or race.” Sadly, racists and slave drivers of Darwin’s era would take his words and those of others to justify race theory and enslavement of Africans.
Fast forward to the racially divisive 1960s, a period often compared to our times. One of that period’s contemporaries, Kwanzaa holiday founder Maulana Karenga considered “race” to be “an arbitrary socio/ biological construct created by Europeans during the time of worldwide colonial expansion
... for the purpose of legitimizing white power and white skin privilege.”
So, dominant thought between the 15th and 18th centuries built the foundation of racial ideology, largely to support the enslavement of Africans.
Some confronted this thinking but the challengers (e.g. the 1688 anti-slavery petition by Daniel Pastorius, a Pennsylvania Quaker) were usually ignored. By the mid-20th century, race was understood to be little more than something people made up to perpetuate select societal norms like slavery’s very American successor, Jim Crow.
Enter our current times. Despite evidence that races don’t scientifically exist, like hamsters in a cage, we’re running ourselves ragged on the wheel of racism. Our collectively doing so reminds me of an adage to describe stupid people: The wheel is spinning, but the hamster is dead.
This is stupid, people. Let’s let it rest in peace.
Uttering such ideas here can render a person canceled or subjected to a high-tech whipping. Some of us are prepared to endure that pain, as we know it is for the good, the good of humanity. Why?
Only a collective shift in thinking will lead to a change in thinking, a placement, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., of content of character above the color of skin.
I mean, after all, isn’t that the dream we have today?