One year on.

It’s a year since George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. There are, of course, numerous newspaper article reminding us about this. Here’s an extract from one of them, showing how it almost wasn’t news:-

“On 26 May 2020, a Minneapolis police spokesman, John Elder, issued a press release headlined: “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction”. It stated that this man had “physically resisted officers” who were eventually able “to get the suspect into handcuffs” before they “noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress”. They called for an ambulance. The suspect went to the hospital. He died. The end.

No mention of “I can’t breathe”. No mention of Floyd calling for his “mama” as he pleaded for his life. No mention of an officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck for over nine excruciating minutes. Had the 17-year-old bystander Daniella Frazier not recorded a video of the incident on her phone, had that video not spread across the internet like wildfire and had masses of angry protesters not spilled on to the streets across the world, it is very possible that Chauvin would still be patrolling the streets of Minneapolis right now.”

The article goes on to say that, in the writer’s opinion, the death of George Floyd was in fact the spark that lit the kindling that had been piling up for more than a short while. Many other similar incidents had been occurring. This one hit social media and went went viral, went world-wide and suddenly we were engulfed in Black Lives Matter. 

Maybe what was unusual was the fact that it went world wide. Perhaps we had mostly accepted that such things happened in the USA but now people began looking at their own countries’ situation and finding it at fault. Maybe the pandemic had already sparked a feeling of “we’re all in this together”. We’d already had #Me Too. Now here was another problem not exclusive to just one nation.

One of the saddest articles I’ve read about the George Floyd case is this one where the young man who sold George Floyd cigarettes, accepted his counterfeit note and then reported it to his employers describes his feelings about his actions:-

“I allowed myself to feel guilty for a very long time before the trial happened,” he said softly, with an eloquence that belies his teenage years. “I just kept replaying that decision in my head. What if I would have just told him he couldn’t buy the cigarettes?”

It’s hard to imagine being so young and knowing that your action had such a ripple effect around the world. 

And suddenly every sports event was preceded by players taking the knee, out of respect for George Floyd and all the others who dad died as a result of racial prejudice. And many of us thought it was something new but it’s a tradition of sorts that goes  back a long way. This article tells the story of Colin Kaepernick who sat, refusing to stand, through the singing of the US national anthem at the start of an American football game in protest against racial violence and found himself quietly banned from NFL teams. Not officially but he just was nit signed up for any teams. This was back in 2016 but that kind of protest goes further back still. 

“Lou Moore, a history professor at Grand Valley State University, said that Kaepernick has helped revive and galvanize a tradition of athlete activism that peaked in the 1960s when Muhammad Ali refused to fight in the Vietnam War and American track athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith gave black power salutes on the podium at the 1968 Summer Olympics.

That tradition largely went dormant in the 1980s and 1990s – in part because Ali, Carlos and Smith lost work and endorsement opportunities for their actions, and in part because many athletes followed the smiling, stick-to-sports examples of superstar pitchmen OJ Simpson and Michael Jordan, who embodied an anodyne ethos reflected in Jordan’s (possibly apocryphal) proclamation that “Republicans buy sneakers, too”.”

Within no time after the death of George Floyd, talk of institutional racism was everywhere. And her’s a little something on that topic:- 

“Institutional racism was a phrase coined in the 1960s by civil rights organiser Stokely Carmichael (also known as Kwame Ture) to illustrate how racism was more about institutional power than individual prejudice. Carmichael stated that “if a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem.” Racism was not about what you wanted to do, but about what you could do and who you could do it to. What will the institutions of society – the police, the courts, the prison system – allow particular classes of people to endure? Racism was a question of which lives mattered to the state.”

The repercussions into people’s everyday lives have been numerous too. There have always been instances of people being afraid of black people doing things that white people do all the time, such as bird-watching, as in another article I read:-

On Monday a black birdwatcher confronted a woman whose dog was not on a lead, something the park notices demanded. She threatened to call the police on the grounds that an African American man hiding in the bushes was threatening her. He told her to go ahead. The police came. Nobody was arrested. It was just an argument between park users. But the black “twitcher” had videos the whole thing on his phone. His sister posted the video to Twitter and it was viewed more than 20 million times. There was, almost inevitably, a fierce backlash on social media. Franklin Leonard, a film executive and founder of The Black List, which ranks the most popular screenplays of the year that Hollywood fails to turn into films, saw racial bias at work. 

“How many times has Amy Cooper said behind closed doors that a black co-worker ‘wasn’t a team player, ‘isn’t one of us, ‘made her uncomfortable’,” he asked. “How many times has she just not been able to put her finger on it, but just doesn’t think they’re the right candidate for the job?”

As a consequence of this, the event came to the attention of the woman’s employers who put her on administrative leave. By Tuesday she had been fired. The investment firm Franklin Templeton tweeted: 

“Following our internal review of the incident in Central Park yesterday, we have made the decision to terminate the employee involved, effective immediately. We do not tolerate racism of any kind at Franklin Templeton.”

Now, I don’t know if the lady in question is seriously racist or if she was just frightened in the park. If she was frightened, of course, that in itself suggests prejudice. And, of course, her calling the police was an over-reaction but surely it has  nothing to do with her employers, especially if she has not done anything racist at work. There seems to be over-reaction in all sorts of places.

Meanwhile, there are going to be vigils all over the place to mark the one-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd. The Guardian wants to hear from people who are attending such vigils, asking why they are attending, what the anniversary means to them. A bit more journalism.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!