INSIDE Tonyaa Weathersbee: Racism is why Black people feared Chauvin would walk.
Unlike George Floyd, who Derek Chauvin suffocated by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes last May, those seeking justice for him can breathe.
At least for now.
A Minneapolis jury found the former police officer guilty on all three of the counts he was charged with; seconddegree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. He faces up to 40 years in prison.
The jury did the right thing. But the great wrong that exists is that Black people feared they wouldn’t get simple justice for a Black man who was murdered by a white police officer.
What was wrong was that it took a summer of protests and unrest for Black people to be heard about the police brutality that had dogged their communities – even though, in Floyd’s case, the whole world saw it.
And that fear reflects how Black people have grown accustomed to Black lives being dehumanized in this nation.
They feared whether some loophole in a law that Black people didn’t craft would allow a juror empathetic to police to hold out on sending one to prison. They feared that a juror would hold Floyd more responsible for drugs that might have been in his system than a policing system that made Chauvin believe he had a license to kill him.
This time, though, those fears weren’t realized. And Theryn Bond, a local activist who led a series of protests in Memphis last summer after Floyd was killed, was in tears over the verdict.
“I’m so overjoyed,” said Bond, as her voice cracked with emotion. “You never think you see this day, so many fights, so many marches, so many protests and speeches before committees, and we finally see it…
“It’s one step, but hopefully it’ll provoke some nationwide reform, to change this heinous policing all around the nation. It shouldn’t take all this…it shouldn’t take somebody being recorded, with multiple witnesses, and weeks and weeks of testimony to convince somebody that this was wrong.”
Bond is right. The Chauvin verdict is just one step.
And there’s no room to rest – because there’s still so much that’s wrong with the system that allowed Floyd to be killed. One of the first steps toward changing that system is for Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice In Policing Act. The act passed the House last month, with most Republicans voting against it.
Among other things, the act bans police chokeholds and makes it easier for individuals to pursue misconduct claims against police by changing what’s known as qualified immunity.
Yet the other step is for activists to be vigilant – because anytime you try to change a power imbalance, those who benefit from that imbalance will try to maintain it.
This can be seen in how GOP lawmakers in multiple states, unhappy that Black and brown voters propelled Joe Biden to the presidency over Donald Trump, have passed a series of laws that make it harder for them to vote. It can be seen in laws passed in Tennessee and in Florida, which, for all intents and purposes, criminalizes protest.
Instead of trying to stay in power by earning Black people’s votes, they’d rather concoct ways to stay in power by suppressing their power.
So, look for bills to emerge in state legislatures to counteract national attempts at reform. Look for law-and-order types, the types who persist in seeing Black people as threats and not citizens, to push bills to make it tougher for bystanders to film police officers, or to do a number of things that preserve that power dynamic at the expense of Black people’s lives.
Be prepared to fight – because even though the Chauvin verdict is a step in the right direction, that direction should have shifted ages ago. Black people shouldn’t be nervous and tense over whether a white police officer who committed murder for all to see would actually be convicted of murder.
But the fact that Black people feared Chauvin would walk speaks to all that is wrong in this nation. And while it’s too late for Floyd, or Breonna Taylor, or any of the other Black people who were killed by police, it’s not too late to stop that brutality and dehumanization from claiming others.
Once that stops, that’s when we can all breathe.
Tonyaa Weathersbee can be reached at tonyaa.weathersbee@commercialappeal.com and you can follow her on Twitter: @tonyaajw