‘The world is watching’
Protests escalate after George Floyd, a Black man, died when a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck.
“A riot is the language of the unheard.”
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke those words in a speech two years after the Watts riots of 1965 in Los Angeles, triggered by the violent shotgun-toting arrest of a Black man for alleged reckless driving, by the California Highway Patrol. Watts burned with civil unrest for six days.
The quote has been cited often in recent days, including by Martin Luther King III.
Not often repeated are the words from Rev. King that followed. “What is it that America has failed to hear?”
It is still deaf all these decades later.
From a president to police departments to prosecutors to large swaths of a population that condemn athletes who take a knee in silent protest against the killing of Black men but aren’t incandescent with rage over a cop kneeling on the neck of a Black man taken into custody. “I can’t breathe,” George Floyd gasps in the disturbing episode on Memorial Day in Minneapolis captured by civilian cellphone video. Floyd pleading for his life as four cops making the arrest pinned him down.
Videos that show Floyd was unresponsive for two minutes and 53 seconds before that officer removed his knee.
Floyd, who called out “Mama,” died.
Minneapolis has been aflame in outrage that descended into rioting and looting on Thursday evening, the third consecutive night of angry public demonstrations. A great many, probably most white people, are in solidarity with Blacks at these demonstrations.
How easy, too easy, to condemn the mayhem as crimes of the mob. I say the fires that engulfed the Third Precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department were a furnace of sanity amid the derangement of a nation.
It is sane to rage against the racism and discriminating violence that targets innocent Black men and boys and women, or citizens suspected of only the most mild of offences.
It is sane to turn that rage against the symbols of institutional torment. It is sane to howl for justice. It is sane for mothers to fear that their Black sons will not make it home alive.
It is sane to declare, with the amplitude of fury: This must stop. The passive are complicit. America, where a Black person is three times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a white person; 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed in those circumstances than a white person, as documented by the Mapping Police Violence research collaborative.
America, where 1,099 people were killed by police in 2019.
America, where about one in 1,000 Black men can expect to die at the hands of police.
America, which was forged on slavery.
It is madness to blame the maddened and the victimized. As the turbulence of choler roils across the American landscape, protests springing from New York City — where a white woman gained ignominy this week for calling police to falsely claim she’d been threatened by an “African-American” in Central Park — to Louisville, where 28-year-old EMT Breonna Taylor was killed in March, shot at least eight times by narcotics detectives after they broke down her apartment door.
At least seven people were shot when protesters demanding justice for Taylor gathered in Louisville on Thursday night. The police say no officer fired their weapon. Then who did? Because make no mistake: One of the outcomes of this week’s turmoil is that white supremacists, already granted far more law enforcement latitude in their own staged rallies and armed to the teeth as civilian militias, will counter Minneapolis with further emboldened hatred.
Spurred on by a president who called protesters “THUGS,” tweeting: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts!” That phrase — which has been labelled a rule violation by Twitter for “glorifying violence” — notoriously originates from both segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace and a Miami police chief in the civil rights era who proclaimed: “There is only one way to handle looters and arsonists during a riot and that is to shoot them on sight.”
“I don’t know where it originated. I wouldn’t know a thing like that,” said President Donald Trump. Because he is an unread ignoramus and righteous barbarian.
A president who said after the violent 2017 “Unite the Right” rally of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., that there were “some very fine people — on both sides.”
A president who could have tried to calm the masses at a Friday press conference in the Rose Garden. Instead, not a word of the havoc in Minneapolis passed his lips, focusing exclusively on his grudge with China over the coronavirus pandemic and announcing that the United States is terminating its relationship with the World Health Organization and directing funds elsewhere.
There is framing and there is un-framing of the riots. Doubts they’ll also serve as justification for a police crackdown on further dissent.
Black blood quickens white blood.
No firefighter dared venture forth to douse the blaze in a Minneapolis suburb. No police officer dared show his or her face in the crowd, even attempt to disperse the mob. But police did protectively ring the home of Derek Chauvin — he of the knee — fired on Wednesday by his police chief along with the other three arresting officers.
It was nowhere near enough and stoked the wrath that led to the frenzy that led, Friday afternoon, to Chauvin finally being charged with thirddegree murder and manslaughter. Just Chauvin. And the DA says, look, we’ve never before so swiftly arrested and charged a cop. What does that say? When it might routinely take a year to clap cuffs on a cop, unlike any other civilian. Not so different from up here in Canada either.
The charging document released by Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman says Chauvin had his knee to Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes and Floyd was nonresponsive for two minutes and 53 seconds during the arrest. Yet the county medical examiner had said preliminary results of an autopsy showed “no physical finding that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation,” suggesting underlying health conditions contributed to the death.
So then let’s say racism killed Floyd. Police brutality killed Floyd.
Had there been no “riots,” would Chauvin have been charged? Had there been no video, the world now watching, would Chauvin have been charged? Why have the other officers not been arrested?
In Minneapolis, 170 businesses were looted, damaged or destroyed on Thursday night. Neighbourhoods that can ill-afford any more economic ravaging have been laid asunder.
But that is not only evidence of rage. It is grief. For Floyd and the untold numbers killed before him, whether swinging from a tree or laid to waste by a police bullet.
At an emotional press conference, Democrat Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said the civil unrest that has destabilized Minneapolis and St. Paul is the result of long-simmering bitterness among the Black populace, a tinderbox ignited.
“The fires still smoulder in our streets. The ashes are symbolic of decades and generations of pain, of anguish.”
In Minneapolis, where the National Guard has been sent in, the city was put on an 8 p.m. curfew Friday.
Rev. King, paragon of nonviolent protest, also said in that 1967 speech — a year before his assassination — about his country: “It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity.
“And so in a real sense, our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again.”