ANGER ON THE STREETS
Police officers detain a man at an ‘I can’t breathe’ rally in New York, after the death of George Floyd, an African-American man who was seen in video footage pleading that he couldn’t breathe as a white police officer knelt on his neck in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Protests over the incident have spread across the US.
Racism will not end until idle spectators become referees and issue red cards to offenders
The US erupted into chaos this week after white police were filmed abusing an unarmed black suspect who later died. Everyone anywhere who has ever allowed even a small instance of racism to go unchecked is as responsible for George Floyd’s death as the officer who knelt on his neck, writes Sue de Groot
On the surface, there seems to be no connection between the fiery conflagration in the US and the usual round of race rows going on in SA. But there is a direct line between what is happening over there and what happens all the time back here, and it involves the spectators rather than the participants.
For anyone who might have avoided the news cycle, here’s what has been happening in the US this week:
On Monday in Minneapolis, Minnesota, George Floyd, 46, was detained by police under suspicion of trying to pay for goods with a counterfeit banknote. He was flung to the ground and police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than five minutes. In the cellphone video filmed by one of several pedestrians who exhorted the police to stop brutalising him, Floyd can be heard gasping “I can’t breathe” and “I’m about to die”.
When the knee was removed from his neck, Floyd’s body was limp. The police took him to hospital, where he died.
The four police officers involved in the killing — Chauvin, Thomas Lane, Tou Thao, and J Alexander Kueng — were fired on Tuesday. On the same day, thousands of protesters gathered in the streets. Some threw objects at police cars and were fired at with rubber bullets and tear gas.
On Wednesday, protesters marched from Cup Foods, the shop outside which Floyd was assaulted, to the Minneapolis police department’s third precinct headquarters. Again, tear gas and rubber bullets were used to disperse them.
Tensions escalated, stones were thrown through windows and buildings set ablaze. One of the protesters was shot dead by a pawn-shop owner who thought the man was trying to loot his store.
On Thursday, when the police officers had still not been criminally charged, a police precinct was set on fire, the National Guard deployed 500 soldiers to Minneapolis, and protests spread to other cities. Chauvin has since been arrested and charged with thirddegree murder and manslaughter.
On Friday, Donald Trump tweeted that protesters were “thugs” and said, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. His tweet was flagged as one that violated Twitter’s rule against inciting violence. Trump went on a paradoxical rampage about free speech and signed an order enabling the US government to regulate social media sites.
Also on Friday, a team of CNN reporters was arrested while reporting on the riots in Minneapolis. They were released with an apology, but later the same day a crowd of anti-police protesters attacked and vandalised CNN headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.
In an unrelated incident, on Monday in New York City, a man called Christian Cooper told a woman called Amy Cooper (they are not related) to put her dog on its leash, as is legally required in Central Park. When she refused, he began to film her on his phone, whereupon she called the police and told them she was being “threatened” by “an African-American man”. The video went viral and Amy lost her job.
Back at home, here are just three recent highlights in the never-ending pile-up of racial collisions in SA:
This week, the labour appeal court in Cape Town overturned a decision by the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration that Shoprite should pay R75,000 to cashier Bulelwa Samka for lack of support from management when Samka was called “a stupid k ***** ” by a customer.
The CCMA had earlier declared that Samka’s store managers were effectively complicit in racial discrimination by not taking her side in this altercation or supporting her afterwards, and ruled that she should be compensated for this dereliction.
The appeal court dismissed this decision on the grounds that the store manager’s defence of the customer (“she pays your salary”, Samka was told) was valid, and that managers are not responsible for the conduct of their customers.
Meanwhile, the furore surrounding aspirant beauty queen Bianca Schoombee continues to sizzle. Schoombee has been publicly derided since the publication of racist and sexist comments she aired on social media in 2014. Some have tried to defend her on the basis that she was only 14 at the time. Others have threatened to rape and kill her.
On the sidelines of increasingly vicious clashes between Schoombee’s supporters and detractors, social media experts have weighed in to call it an example of why children should not go on social media too early and why parents should monitor their children’s online activities.
They are missing the point, which is that if 14-year-old Schoombee had been challenged about her prejudices as a child, she might not have posted — or even thought — such derogatory things in the first place.
Which brings us back to the court’s decision in the Shoprite case. Legally, it might be in line with the contractual responsibilities of employers towards their employees. In the context of trying to build a less racist country, however, it fails miserably because it effectively exonerates everyone who stands silently by and does nothing when they hear or see another person being treated as inferior because of their race or gender.
The customer who verbally abused Samka should not be excused, either on account of her advanced age or because she had been a customer at the store for 30 years. But she is not the only person to blame for this unacceptable behaviour. One can assume that she and many who surrounded her have lived all their lives with the assumption that black people belong to an inferior race and therefore can be spoken to in such a way. It is also safe to assume that there have been few, if any, occasions when they have been challenged by people who think differently.
What does all this have to do with the race war going on in the US? The same unchallenged racist speech or behaviour that led to Schoombee’s downfall and Samka’s humiliation underpin both the firing of Amy Cooper and the death of George Floyd.
Amy Cooper may not have used the n-word on Chris Cooper, but her unprovoked, hysterical phone call to the police about “an African-American man” speaks of ingrained fear and hostility. It is exceedingly likely that this attitude — black men are scary and want to harm white women — was inculcated throughout her life. It is also likely that there was never a time when anyone who did not agree with this prejudice spoke out to correct Amy’s entrenched, illogical racism.
The ripples of racism do not end with Amy. Almost every report on the Cooper vs Cooper incident emphasised the fact that Christian, the man who politely asked Amy to put her dog on its leash, was “a Harvard graduate” and “an avid birdwatcher”. There’s an underlying implication that had he been a wild-eyed black vagrant, she might have had more cause for panic.
As for Chauvin and the three police officers who stood by while he crushed Floyd’s windpipe, it is probably more than safe to assume that their thinking has never effectively been challenged by any friend, relative or colleague who might disagree with the idea that whites are superior to blacks.
Contextualising Floyd’s death within the racist bent of law enforcement in the US, Jelani Cobb wrote this week in the New Yorker: “The video of Floyd’s death is horrific but not surprising; terrible but not unusual, depicting a kind of incident that is periodically re-enacted in the United States. It’s both necessary and, at this point, pedestrian to observe that policing in this country is mediated by race.”
The protests that have ensued on various levels in response to all these incidents in SA and the US are directed at the perpetrators, but they should also be directed at the bystanders — anyone who ever ignored a racist slur. That probably applies to every one of us. At some point we have all had a hand, by our non-involvement, in feeding the petri-dish culture from which virulent hatred and violence erupt.
Schoombee did not light the fires in Minneapolis. The old lady who used the k-word on Samka did not asphyxiate George Floyd. But every person who stood by while these two were honing their racism unchecked is responsible for the knee shoved into Floyd’s neck and the flaming rage of protesters.
Racism will not end until idle spectators become referees and issue red cards to offenders. How else will anyone learn? Chastising racists is not synonymous with condoning vicious threats and violent protests. These things would not happen if the racism that gives rise to them were not allowed in the first place. It’s enough. We must stop it.