The Observer view on the killing of George Floyd
There is a dreadful familiarity about the killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, by white police officers in Minneapolis last Monday. Floyd’s final moments were videoed from a bystander’s phone. He repeatedly pleads for mercy. His last words, “I can’t breathe”, have become a rallying cry for often violent protests that have since shaken cities across America.
The fact that the US has been here before, countless times, does not lessen the horror of this crime nor mitigate brutal police actions. Quite the opposite. It’s right that all four officers involved have been sacked. One, who kept his knee pressed on the handcuffed Floyd’s windpipe for several minutes even though he plainly did not pose a threat, has been charged with murder.
The widespread fury that this killing has aroused is not unprecedented.
Similar eruptions followed high-profile police killings of black men, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City, both in 2014. Nearly 30 years ago, rioting in Los Angeles sparked by the police beating of Rodney King left 63 people dead.
All the same, this latest incident feels dangerously different, for three reasons. One is the sense that increasingly militarised US police forces, which often appear remote from and antagonistic to the communities they serve, have not learned the lessons of the past. This despite ardent campaigning by groups such as Black Lives Matter and the greater prominence of black people in public life.
African Americans comprise 12% of the US population. But according to data for 2015-19, they accounted for 26.4% of those killed by police in all circumstances. Put another way, black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people, who form 61% of the population. While this is not a new problem, the repeated, systemic failure to fix it has become critical.
A second exacerbating factor is Donald Trump and the unvanquished white supremacist thinking he personifies. This vile legacy has deep roots in an originally pro-slavery consti
tution, the blood myths of the confederacy, and late 19th-century Nordicism, eugenics and nativism, the period when the slogan “America First” was coined.
When Trump tweets menacingly about “looting and shooting”, as he did last week, or mocks “shithole countries” in Africa, expresses a preference for migrants from Norway, and describes Charlottesville neo-Nazis as “very fine people”, he echoes an ingrained, bigoted belief among some white people that black people are inferior – indeed, that black lives don’t matter.
Trump’s behaviour has been predictably irresponsible and inflammatory. While mayors from Minneapolis to Atlanta and Portland struggled to maintain order, rightly shaming those who used the Floyd tragedy to indulge in theft and arson, Trump’s main concern was to look tough in front of his mostly white base. He can kiss goodbye to the black vote in November.
Many other voter groups, including the Latinx and Asian communties, may also have been alienated. The demonstrators, most of whom acted lawfully, came from a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds, including white people. This was a multiracial protest representing what is best in America against what was, in effect, a modernday lynching.
The angry explosion was also a reaction to the societal stresses caused by the Covid-19 pandemic – a third reason why this new episode in America’s unending racial conflicts is different. The disproportionate impact of the virus on black people, in terms of death and infection rates, has unforgettably dramatised the corrosive inequality at the heart of American society.
These protests will eventually cease. But injustice, bigotry and social malaise will not – not until all Americans want it.
This was a multiracial protest representing what is best in America against what was, in effect, a modern-day lynching