On police murder, and minority firewalls
This morning I watched a video (below)of a white Minneapolis police officer murdering a handcuffed Black man on the street, slowly. At times, the officer grinned — keeping his left knee on the back of the neck and skull of the restrained Black man.
People gathered around protested and pleaded for restraint and humanity from the officer, at first seemingly worried, then justifiably enraged, demanding that the White officer go about his business of detention and or arrest without brutalizing the already restrained and helpless Black man. The restrained man himself protested, saying that he was having trouble breathing.
Then, after loud gurgles and grunts, he stopped speaking and lay prone, his face blank and facing the camera. The White officer kept his knee on the neck of the restrained, helpless Black man, now apparently unconscious.
Voices from the gathered crowd grew more desperate and furious, pointing out that the Black man was now not moving and seemingly out cold. “Get the fuck off him!” a woman’s voice rang out.
“What are you doing?”
“He’s not fucking moving. Bro, he’s not even fucking moving, get off of his fucking neck!”
Still, the knee on the neck remained, minute after minute, the White officer continuing his slow torture and murder of the Black man — a human being named George Floyd — who would soon be pronounced dead.
The crowd included several people of color, it seems, and as they grew more alarmed, disgusted, and angry sounding at the torture and execution being carried out by the state on their street, it felt possible that someone might jump in and attempt to stop the state murder in action, risking their own life in the process. During these heated moments when it seemed within the realm of possibility that citizens, many people of color, might step in to stop this murder of a Black man — Floyd — by the White police officer, another officer — this one apparently also a person of color — stepped in between the people and his partner.
The slow-motion murder then continued with the protection of that firewall. The minority officer stood tall, unmoved by either the killing or the pleas for its cessation.
He stood stoically, hands at his waist, back turned to the violence that his threatening presence allowed to continue as people around him protested and pleaded for restraint and humanity. “Back on the street!” the minority officer then ordered and pushed back against those who demanded he instead turn and face the murder he was enabling.
“Are you serious?” a bystander asked in response.
More space was needed for the killing to continue, and it was the minority police officer’s job, in this instance, to secure it for the White officer to continue the murder of Floyd.
Of course, people of color serving as firewalls of support for systems of oppression are nothing new here in the United States. In fact, people of color are being asked to back off and give up all sorts of urgent concerns lately in this election year, and all too often the folks demanding that unconditional firewall support are from the liberal establishment, not the hated and supposedly uniquely bad conservative or reactionary wing.
We are told that in order to fight the supposedly unique racist oppression of our current President and his partisans in Congress, it’s in our own best interest to vote for whoever is put up by the other party in opposition. The time isn’t right, we’re lectured, to point out the presumptive Democratic nominee’s decades long opposition to the mechanisms of racial school integration, or he and his party’s role in authoring and pushing through racist crime legislation that created a new, largely privatized Jim Crow system and devastated several generations of poor, minority people and that created windfalls of profit for their corporate backers.
“Back off,” we’re told, in polite liberal language, when we point out how appallingly insulting it is for the presumptive Democratic nominee to campaign in South Carolina on a Big Lie that might make Joseph Goebbels blush — that he protested apartheid in South Africa, was arrested for it, and was thanked by Nelson Mandela for his sacrifice. “That’s old news” , we’re told, when we remind folks how such recent lies meant to deceive and manipulate Black voters is only a repetition of his decades’ long lies about being involved in the Civil Rights Movement, including his citing protests and events that didn’t happen, or his career-long lie that he has always been “endorsed” by the NAACP, which has not only never endorsed him but also does not endorse political candidates at all.
“There are kids in cages,” after all, we’re told as if we’re the ones who need reminding of this, and implicitly asked to forget whose administrations built and first used those cages, in addition to deporting levels of brown refugees and immigrants that no presidential administration before had ever reached, and which our current President can only hope to achieve one day with great effort. It’s time to get behind a party who at once declares our current President and his party a unique threat to decency, the rule of law, and marginalized people, we’re told by the Democratic party whose congressional members have nonetheless voted time and again to give this President unprecedented war-making and domestic spying authority over us, who rubber stamp his handouts to the super wealthy and insist that universal healthcare, which racial minorities and the poor need more than anyone else, will not and cannot happen.
There is no shortage of people of color willing to continue to be firewalls for the oppressing establishment in the political sphere, of course, just like it’s no rare occurrence for racist police brutality to be committed by people of color in uniforms on citizens of color. People can believe these are unrelated incidents, if that makes them feel better, that there is no thread between firewalls on the street and firewalls on election days.
We can also believe that people of color serving as political protection for the white patriarchal establishment — in law enforcement, in politics, in the corporate world — will this year have a different and more positive outcome than it has for every year of hundreds of years before it. I do not share that hope.
Two weeks ago, I read of a Black woman-Breonna Taylor- and her boyfriend Kenneth Walker getting shot by police officers who said they believe they had broken in…to their own home. Taylor died and Walker was charged with assault and attempted murder. A few days prior I watched on video a Black man — Ahmaud Arbery - get lynched by White men who giddily recorded it.
The local police department sat on that video for nearly half a year without making a single arrest, only moving into action after the video got leaked to the public. Last week I heard the presumptive Democratic nominee say that any Black person who had serious questions about what he could offer them in a presidential administration after his five decades of fighting racial integration, and pushing perhaps the most materially damaging and racist legislation of the past three decades wasn’t really Black.
Then, this morning I watched a video of a white Minneapolis police officer murdering a handcuffed Black man on the street, slowly, with the protection of a minority firewall.
“Are you serious?” some of us are asking.
“Get back on the street!” comes the angry reply.
