As the life and death of George Floyd matter, so do Collins Khosa’s
Outrage in the US at police violence could shape politics in SA
● When the coronavirus first began to spread, every second pundit predicted that the world would not be the same again. Many looked to histories of the plague to argue that pandemics seldom leave societies untouched politically.
Of course, the coronavirus pandemic is not yet over, and we don’t have any concrete sense of how it will leave our societies when it subsides. The economic crash we are heading for in SA will certainly change our politics in fundamental ways. Right now we can’t say what those are. All we can offer is speculation.
But the first major political shift under way before our eyes is the rebellion sweeping the US in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd. African-Americans, and progressive whites, have been opposing racist police violence since the end of the Civil War. And there have been periodic flare-ups of urban rebellion over the years, most famously, perhaps, the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992.
In 2014, the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police, turned the fledging Black Lives Matter movement into a powerful national and international force. Like all social-media-driven forms of politics, it didn’t endure as an organised force, and its leadership was soon captured by NGO politics. But it certainly made a huge impact in 2014 and 2015.
But the rebellion that has followed the police murder of Floyd is something new. It is national, it has sustained itself and is a black-led multiracial movement. There has been a direct challenge to the authority of the state. Police stations have been burnt and New York City has been placed under curfew for the first time since World War 2.
President Donald Trump has resorted to the racist language of the segregationists of the 1960s and has appeared as a very weak leader. Some of his own supporters and officials have jumped ship.
More than a few commentators have made comparisons with the Arab Spring in 2011 and wondered if there is now a real possibility of a fundamental shake-up of the political order in the US. It is too early to draw any definitive conclusion, but if protests can be sustained, can cohere around a central demand and hold space in the central parts of the main cities, it could be very difficult for Trump to swiftly get things back to “business as usual”.
A number of commentators have noted that in the US the election of black mayors, the appointment of black police chiefs and even the election of a black president, did not stop racist police violence. It is being argued that this points to the limits of electoral politics and the need for forms of organisation and contestation outside of the electoral arena.
An inspiring progressive candidate for the presidency can, as happened with Barack Obama, and might have happened with Bernie Sanders, redirect grassroots energies back into electoral politics as election day approaches. But in November, Americans will have to choose between Trump and Joe Biden, who has the charisma of a wet dishcloth. Progressives will probably vote for Biden, but they won’t do so with any enthusiasm, and so the politics of popular outrage could remain on the streets for a long time.
With millions of jobs being lost across the US due to the pandemic, it is not impossible that a movement that began in multiracial rage at anti-black racism could turn into a broader demand for a more just and inclusive social order.
All of this carries important lessons for SA. As we know, our police are, in fact, more violent than those in the US and kill three times more people each year, per capita. The fact that the police here killed 11 people in the first part of the lockdown, along with one more person killed by the army, has jolted many people into awareness that we too confront a serious policing issue.
And, just like in the US, having black politicians and officials in authority has not stopped the scourge, which overwhelmingly affects poor black people.
In 2015, Black Lives Matter became an important influence on the student movement in campuses across SA. That movement began with inspiring progressive aspirations. On some campuses it was soon captured by the ANC and the EFF, and pro-Zuma and pro-Gupta forces like Black First Land First. But its initial demands around curriculum reform, antiracism and access were certainly just.
Is it possible that, again, a political explosion in the US, this time a far bigger one than that in 2014, could shape politics here? That seems likely. Quite how things will play out is anyone’s guess. But one thing that we know for sure is that we have a very serious problem with police violence, including the frequent killing of poor black people.
If we say that black lives matter, as all should, then certainly it is not a large leap to say that just as the life of George Floyd should matter, so too the lives of Collins Khosa and all the other people killed by the police during the lockdown should matter.