The right’s fight to focus on anything but race
There was a swirl of courtroom statements and news coverage Friday as former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22 years in prison for the murder of George Floyd.
Prosecutor Matthew Frank, during Chauvin’s sentencing hearing, summed up the facts of what Chauvin did to Floyd last summer: “This is not a momentary gunshot, punch to the face. This is nine and a half minutes of cruelty to a man who was helpless and just begging for his life.”
Chauvin’s defense attorney, Eric Nelson, correctly said: “The intensity of the public interest in this case cannot be understated.”
But he also said the Chauvin case was at the “epicenter of a cultural and political divide.”
A Fox News anchor, prior to the sentencing, asked: “Is there a number, some kind of magical number in there, that can somehow miraculously satisfy Americans on both sides of the political aisle?”
Both sides of the political aisle? A political divide?
A white police officer murdering an unarmed Black man in broad daylight on the streets of a major American city should not be a political issue. The fact that it is tells you all you need to know about why nationwide protests erupted in the wake of Floyd’s death, and why race and policing in America and institutional racism in general must be reckoned with, honestly and fearlessly, in the workplace, in the military and, yes, in the classroom.
Chauvin murdered Floyd, pinned him facedown on the street with his knee on his neck for more than nine minutes. Millions upon millions of Americans saw that video. There is no nuance to what happened. There should be no political divide over the horror of those nine minutes or what they represent.
But there is, and that’s the very reason the Black Lives Matter movement and other groups and individuals calling for difficult conversations about race and this country’s history of racism remain both vital and necessary.
The moment the video of Floyd’s murder went viral, it was clear Americans had to reckon with long-simmering issues of race and police brutality. But as that reckoning began, with large protests and nationwide calls for police reform, a segment of white America ran away from the truth and worked overtime to divert attention from the murder and onto anything else.
The protests were largely peaceful (a report by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project found 93% of the Black Lives Matters protests in 2020 were peaceful), but there were well-documented instances of rioting and looting. So Fox News, Republican politicians and other right-wing news outlets focused on the violence, not on the point of the protests or the overwhelming percentage of those protests that remained nonviolent.
Outrage at police brutality was treated as all-out hatred of police officers, leading to wholly unnecessary counters to the Black Lives Matter slogan, like Blue Lives Matter and All Lives Matter.
Once protesters started using the slogan “Defund the Police,” based on a push to reallocate some police department funding to other community services, Fox News and others relentlessly attacked this idea and used it to convince a largely white audience that if liberals had their way, America would look like a fulltime version of the lawless, anarchic movie “The Purge.”
Again, there was no reckoning with the reasons behind the slogans, or the painful human experiences that led people to create them. There was only noise and outrage, a transparent attempt to distract from complex and often unflattering elements of our society.
It was easy for those who never experienced these painful things to cast them aside in favor of halfbaked moral outrage.
And that’s why, more than a year after Floyd’s death, the years in prison that the police officer who killed him must serve is “a magical number” that has to “miraculously satisfy Americans on both sides of the political aisle.”
Nobody should be satisfied with anything in this case. And nobody should look at Chauvin’s sentence and see some kind of number that’s going to fix all that ails this country or, as seems to be the wish of the Fox News crowd, silence the people who’ve spent the past year calling for change.
Nobody should look at the case of a white cop murdering a Black man and see the epicenter of a political divide.
The only divide that exists here is between right and wrong.
Chauvin was wrong, beyond measure, and will now face more than 22 years in prison.
The right thing for Americans to do moving forward is confront all that has brought us to this moment and realize nothing gets better without work and honesty and humility. Anything less is just a lame attempt to change the conversation.
Anything less is just wrong.