George Floyd’s death shines a spotlight on racism everywhere
ON 25 MAY in Minneapolis, George Floyd was killed after a policeman detained him by kneeling on his neck for eight minutes while Floyd pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. Police had been called by a grocery store that claimed Floyd had forged a cheque. Thousands responded by protesting against police brutality with crowds setting fire to buildings. Donald Trump described the protestors as ‘thugs’.
Meanwhile, across the country in New York’s Central Park, Amy Cooper had been walking her dog in a section popular with birdwatchers, without a lead. Amy was asked by birdwatcher Christian Cooper to put a lead on her dog and an argument ensued. A video that has now gone viral shows Amy warning that she would call the police if Christian didn’t stop filming. ‘I’m going to tell them there’s an Africanamerican man threatening my life,’ she says. Amy then goes on to do just that.
The Central Park case illustrates the complexities of white supremacy. White supremacy is the racist belief that white people are superior to people of other races. That imagined sense of superiority is so deeply ingrained that white people often lean on it with little or no provocation. That’s what Amy did when she, a white woman, called the police on a black man, Christian. On the call, Amy feigned hysterics and lied that Christian was threatening her life. Amy has since lost her job, claiming her ‘entire life is being destroyed’. But if she’d been successful in getting the police to come to her rescue, she might have destroyed Christian’s life.
A white woman so appalled at the mere notion of a black man telling her what to do that she calls the police is a tale as old as time. It’s the first chapter in the white supremacist manual. What is a little more challenging for well-meaning white people, and some people of colour, to understand, however, is the white supremacy implicit in their portrait of Christian Cooper.
‘This is Christian Cooper,’ reads one of the many tweets accompanied by a video of Christian beaming as he speaks of the joys of birdwatching. Cooper is a clean-cut black man who wears wire-rimmed glasses. He is a ‘good black man’, mild-mannered and thoughtful about nature. Being ‘good’ is a falsehood of respectability politics that black people often internalise, and white people often uphold, in the hopes that making white people comfortable will immunise them from discrimination and police brutality. It does not.
Likewise, portraying Floyd as a ‘bad’ black man who resisted arrest helps to justify why he was killed. Respectability politics puts the responsibility for their killings on the victims.
As a British onlooker, it is easy to dismiss these cases as exclusive to America and ignore the way white supremacy threatens black people in Britain. But we have had our own problematic cases. For instance, campaigners are asking the Government to review the police use of tasers following a ‘disturbing rise’ in instances of their use against black people.
To eradicate white supremacy, it is vital that we, as a global society, understand how it presents itself and how we as individuals consciously or unconsciously perpetuate its ills. Caricatures of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ black people only work when they uphold white supremacist ideals about respectability and create wriggle room for racists who wilfully target black people to excuse their violence. To have full accountability, we must resist the urge to fall into the trap of seeing one kind of black life as more valuable, more deserving of life, than another.