a few days or more and it is because the world fell into a black hole. I started keeping a journal when the Covid-19 pandemic started. Saving images. Text messages. Emails. Anything.
The pandemic and the troubles of the world.
I wanted to make a historical record. It felt necessary. But now, I am reminded that even in a pandemic some things don’t change much. The United States of America, the country where I was born, goes about the business of killing black people like it is nothing. Like smoking a cigarette.
First, it was the pandemic, and now a 46 year old black man named George Floyd was murdered by the police in Minneapolis in broad daylight in front of an ocean of witnesses.
Mr. Floyd, according to reports, and videos was held down, knee on his throat, and he died. Four police officers. It was filmed by a person with a mobile phone. And someone else with a mobile phone. Store cameras caught some of it.
The movie spread like the coronavirus only faster. Happened on Memorial Day. A day for the dead. A day to remember those who have died. For a cause. And on that day, the man who is President of this country, a man despised and undeserving of respect, commemorated this day of the departed as did many others.
And George Floyd was being killed. Wasn’t long before the videos leaked out and went viral on nearly every social media site known to men and women and children. Recycled, shared, retweeted, tweeted, and uploaded. Soon, the big networks, those corporate giants who seem to control the narrative in some circles, played the video. George Floyd dying before our eyes. Killed by a copper. Most could only watch once and then they erupted.
Was sickening. George said he couldn’t breathe as he was choked with a knee of a copper. Called out for his mother. Died. Poof. Like that. One minute he was in a store allegedly passing a bad bill; the next moment, he was expired. Game over. Swatted like a fly. Stomped like a roach.
The next day, protestors hit the streets of Minneapolis like there was a rock concert going on. Thousands of people. Then it spread to other cities. There is a pandemic in this country but suddenly it didn’t matter because America has another pandemic. A longer pandemic. America was built on a pandemic.
Racial pandemonium. White supremacy. One that goes on and on. No vaccine is being developed for it either. Mattered but it didn’t matter. George Floyd is dead. Protest over his death spread like a pandemic. The masses were, at last, sick of it all. People from all races marched. Chanted. Demanded. The police officers weren’t even arrested. Killed someone, and went about their business.
Like Emmitt Till. Michael Brown. Trayvon Martin. Tamir Rice. Like Ahmaud Arbery, jogging down a road in Brunswick, Georgia, pursued like a rat, cornered, and murdered. Not by police officers either. Just two white men who took it upon themselves to be the law. And if anything, that killing and the response was a clue to what was to come as the public health problem pulled the country into the quicksand.
Ahmaud Arbery was killed in February. Nothing was done. The two men were released after they gave police their version of the murder. The case was about to die right there. But a third man released a video, through his lawyer (why he would do that should be the subject of a scientific study), of the shooting, because he also had been involved. Had been tracking the chase of Arbery.
It was like something out of a slave narrative, something that many thinks has long since been over. The notion is that whites have a right to control black bodies. That is what happened in Brunswick to Ahmaud Arbery.
The release of the tape eventually set into motion something that the killers didn’t see coming. Perhaps their own miseducation had clouded their judgment. Maybe they believed the myth that black people didn’t fight back, didn’t struggle for freedom and justice, for themselves, and for all. Maybe.
When the killing of Arbery on the road went viral, the reaction on social media was fierce and then the local reaction was ferocious as black people marched and protested on the road where Arbery had been murdered two months prior release of the video. They made noise and within a day, the two men responsible for Arbery’s death were in jail. This was the preface to the video where George Floyd is murdered.
But in between that, there was Amy Cooper, a white woman, in Central Park with her dog unleashed. Had her dog unleashed when a black man, Christian Cooper, a bird watcher came through and complained about her dog being not on a leash. Like just being a good citizen. Leash your dog. Control your dog. He cut on his movie. Like George Holiday in Los Angeles many years ago when the L.A. police pulled over the motorist Rodney King. Started filming.
Technology. A Black man begins to film a white woman because her dog is unleashed and she begins to threaten him, on camera racially.
Two years ago, two black men came into a Starbucks in Philadelphia. Sat down because they were meeting someone there. A white woman, a Starbucks employee, called the police on them because they didn’t order anything. They got arrested.
It was a similar moment. Someone filmed the Starbucks arrest as well. Yet, another one of those still, racist microaggressions we have to experience each day because the country where we live, the men who founded it, decided white supremacy (racism) was useful to them. I remember the Starbucks incident. It was April 19, 2018.
The Central Park black man as a bird watcher got similar responses. Like we can’t get out of the loop. Like we are insane as a species. Same thing over and over. Someone films it, it gets posted, shared, tweeted, re-tweeted, media outlets pick it up, and the whole thing gets set on top of an examination table like a cadaver in med school or a legal case in law school and pulled apart piece by piece. What happened? It seems like a waste of energy.
Amy Cooper doesn’t complain to Christian Cooper in a normal way, but she comes at him in a powerful way. I am a white person. I control you and your body. Your movements. Your actions. I am a white woman, my dog is not on his/her leash and you are black, so stop filming me, or I will call the police on you. And she says it too.
I am going to tell the police that there is an African-American man threatening me, in Central Park. Those were her words. White supremacy. A film. That’s what I see over and over these days. The daily slights. It is everywhere.
Has always been everywhere. The power of whiteness is being pushed upon black people. Amy Cooper pushed it and it didn’t work. There’s a tape of it. She lost her job. She lost her dog (temporarily). Her life, in just 30 seconds of gutless, racist behavior was lost right there before our eyes, in Central Park.
Same Central Park that back many years ago was the scene of rape of the white woman jogger. That rape, hysteria, and racist police department and criminal justice system landed five young black and brown men in jail. Wrongfully convicted. Lives are thrown away. It almost seemed appropriate that Central Park played a role in it all, some 31 years later.
Was just entering law school when that case was making headlines. Just understanding the system I was entering and trying to change. I remember it vividly. And I thought at the time, they were being railroaded.
Yet, you kind of get used to it. You get numb. Just like when I heard about George Floyd, I didn’t bat an eye or pause to track down the tape. Eric Garner was choked to death in New York by police officers and it was filmed, and no one has been ever charged. Alton Sterling was murdered by police, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on tape, and no one was held responsible.
And all of that, we get the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, for all the world to see. Millions watched a black man smothered to death. Four police officers arrived on the scene in Minneapolis after a report that Floyd passed a counterfeit $20 bill. Not true. Yet, he was taken through the motions anyway. And soon he was dead.
Loaded into the back of an ambulance, without a pulse, not breathing. Dead. After three police officers held him down, one with his knee on George’s neck for about 9 minutes. He begged for his life. Called for his mother. Said he could breathe. One of the officers teased him, as a “tough guy.”
At least I swore that’s what I heard. Maybe I am wrong. Yet he was dead. Killed. His family’s lawyer, Benjamin Crump would later say — the ambulance was a hearse. He said this because when George was lifted from that street, lifeless. He was dead. And then the world exploded. America exploded. Still exploding. This is the one.
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Previously Published on Medium
Photo — Adanya Gilmore (used by permission) — George Floyd Memorial — Minneapolis, MN, 2020