As far as slogans go, it’s a modest proposal: Black Lives ‘Matter’. But for a nation whose first words were a declaration of this supposedly self-evident truth, there’s still no assurance. Then again, it would be a full century before ‘equal’ wasn’t preceded by a parenthetical ‘separate, but’.
This month will mark three months since the death of George Floyd. America is still out, in the streets.
Those who knew him described him as a “gentle giant” - the kind of man who “would dance badly to make people laugh” As a child, in school, George Floyd once wrote that he wanted to be a Justice of the Supreme Court. Things didn’t work out that way. Financial pressures squeezed him out of school, and into drugs. He racked up a criminal record - once spending ten months in prison for a $10 drug sale. But when Floyd left New York for Minneappolis, he promised himself a new beginning. Instead, of course, he met his end.
It was at the end that the rest of us first met him. In his last eight minutes and forty six seconds, twice, we heard him call out for his dead mother. Sixteen times, he said he couldn’t breathe.
This was five times more than Eric Garner, six years earlier. Over fifty protests sprouted all over the country following Garner’s death. Protesters held up the same placards they held up for Trayvon Martin the year before: Black Lives Matter. But a grand jury thought otherwise. Officer Pantaleo, the man who murdered Garner, wasn’t indicted. The eventual settlement was paid by the people of New York.
For Black America, that Floyd and Garner shared last words was not a coincidence: it was a pattern. It was the pattern that led Chauvin to continue to dig his knee into Floyd’s throat long after he was limp and motionless - for a whole minute after the ambulance arrived to take him. It was the pattern that led police officers to fill ‘none’ in the injury section for Breonna Taylor’s report, after she was shot over half a dozen times. It was the pattern that allowed Officer Pantaleo to continue to wear his uniform for an entire decade after it was first smeared with Garner’s blood.
There’s not much in any of the facts that was new. This wasn’t the first black ‘celebrity death’ this year: Ahmaud Arbery was hunted down on his morning jog. Breonna Taylor’s house was broken into, leaving eight bullets in her body.
It wasn’t the first incident of Police brutality in Minneapolis. Over the past decade from last year, almost two in every three victims in a police shooting was African American, despite making up only a fifth of the population.
This wasn’t even Derek Chauvin’s first killing: the seventeen complaints against him included three shootings, one of which was fatal. Consider, then, that Chauvin was their ‘training officer’. Twice, he received a medal of valor, once for “showing great restraint and composure in using only as much force as necessary to prevent loss of life and further injury”.
And yet, for all the similarities, there’s a sense that this time is different - that the cycle can be broken. This time, it seems America will have something to show for it.
Four days before Floyd’s death, the Economist ran the headline, ‘Whatever happened to Black Lives Matter?’ At the fifth anniversary in Ferguson, though body cams had been introduced, police killings had increased. They killed three people every day. For those surprised by the outpouring of people during the pandemic, as far as black men go, they weren’t risking their lives; they were protesting their sixth-biggest cause of death.
But forget that it’s been over half a decade to Black Lives matter; it’s now been over a century since even Plessy. In the meantime, America, through black ink, injected colour into schools in ‘54, votes in ‘65, and housing in ‘68. It has spent over a third of the new century with a black man as its president. That its citizens seek reassurance for the importance of their very lives seems a massive step back. It goes against the neat journey from slavery to abolition to the Civil Rights Movement to Barack Obama.
But President Obama’s journey, more than anything else, illustrates exactly what is wrong with the system. The first time that African Americans sought reassurance that their lives mattered was under a black President. As Harvard Professor, Cornel West reminded us, “We’ve tried black faces in high places. Black Lives Matter emerged under a black president, a black attorney general and a black homeland security. And they could not deliver.” Add to that count that the next attorney-general was also black, and that this came at a time with the highest number of black people in congress, in its history.
In 2008, forty years after Bobby Kennedy famously proclaimed that things were ‘moving so fast in race relations a Negro could be president in forty years’, the forty-fourth President, Barack Obama, raised his right hand and swore solemnly in a white house built by black slaves.
Barack Obama promised a More Perfect Union and left one even more divided. Candidate Obama spoke of the present - ‘Yes We Can’. President Obama spoke of the sins of the past and hope of the future. After eight years in Office, Former-President Obama posts tepid takes on Medium (the aptness of the title is not lost). The grey haired ‘cool-uncle’ who seems to have forgotten he was ever President, urges people to work within the system.
Really, Obama doesn’t have much to offer beyond Candidate Clinton visiting Los Angeles, following the Rodney King Riots, diagnosing the unrest as a case of people who are “not part of the system at all anymore.” Though black voters overwhelmingly backed Clinton, by the time he was done, the only ‘system’ they were really in was the carceral system. Clinton now, himself, accepts as much. If Obama isn’t ready for that kind of introspection, he may as well stick to updating his Goodreads profile.
Churchill’s Finest Hour seems behind him. Collston - whose ships carried some 80,000 slaves - now, himself, belongs to the water. Columbus is, once again, lost and not where he is supposed to be (or, alternatively, he is finally exactly where he should be).
Back in the US, Obama’s advice to ‘work within the system’ is falling deaf, flushed ears. But if working within the system has failed, what has being out on the streets brought?
The protests are, by many metrics, the largest, by far, in the history of the United States, making the original civil rights movement seem like an indie movement, by comparison. But they are also deep: they span not only geography, but also the demographics within. Part of it is the pandemic - the prevailing sense of despair and doubt that turns the eye in, and pushes people out. Part of it is that the trigger-happy men in blue have really shot themselves in both feet: as new video clips validate past grievances every day, the US government has responded by deploying more soldiers than are on-ground in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
In any case, despite all this, over two months on, it seems like if this is going to be a truly transformative movement, more is needed. Part of the problem is the messaging. For a movement that, by design, lacks a clear hierarchy, it is difficult to coalesce around a common narrative. It’s only natural, given the way things have played out, that the lighting rod for change is, largely, police reform. And in two months, a lot has been achieved on that front.
LA’s Mayor Garcetti has called for $150 million in cuts to the LAPD, while New York’s Mayor de Blasio has called for shifting funds from the NYPD to youth and social services. Minneapolis has called for the disbanding of the police department altogether. In Washington, a bill calls for making it easier to sue the police, banning no-knock warrants, and chokeholds.
But those who are out on the streets aren’t just there for police reform. Day after day, scenes coming out of the US remind us that we are living through history. In a particularly moving interaction, two generations of black men grapple with how to end the cycle before it consumes 16 year-old Raymon Curry.
Through a voice quivering with the weight of generations of despair, the 31-year old Curtis Hayes cries out, “He’s angry at 46, I’m angry at 31. You’re angry at 16...Come up with a better way.
That, of course, is why America is still out on the streets: rage. Label it whatever you want, but the ultimate question is how to make sure there isn’t a fourth generation.
In 2001, a few thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean, Richard Reid attempted to detonate two shoes packed with explosives. A combination of perspiration-soaked shoes and the valour of passenger’s perseverance thwarted the attempt, but for almost two decades since, passengers across US airports have had to remove their shoes before passing through scanners. It didn’t end transatlantic terrorism, but it did reduce available hiding places by one.
As reductionist as the comparison may seem, police reform will only cover one hole in a particularly evasive game of whack-a-mole. Malcolm X, in broad brush terms, caught part of the malleability decades ago when he said bloodhounds and white hoods had been swapped for police dogs and police uniforms. But that, again, was only part of it: racism in America has demonstrated an uncanny ability to slip through the cracks.
The end of the civil rights movement marked the beginning of Nixon’s war on drugs - incarcerating, in disproportionate numbers, a population that used proportionately less. The overt terror of the Red Summer in the 20s gave way to the covert redlining of the 60s. When the financial exclusion was made evident, it gave way to predatory lending and subprime loans under the garb of inclusion.
So how far back does one go? To this, there are those, who contend that to consider the problem as one of only race, is to see it as something that is, quite literally, only skin-deep. The even less popular Clinton, would respond, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism?” The man she beat for the nomination back in 2016 would respond, “It’s not either-or. It’s never either-or. It’s both.”
Black Lives Matter, itself, knows this. BLM’s #Whatmatters2020 lists Racial Injustice right at the top, but Economic Injustice just a few spots below. MLK, too, knew this. The 1963 March was, of course, the March on Washington - for Jobs and Freedom. Even afterwards, having decided that LBJ’s ‘war on poverty’ was hardly a skirmish, let alone a ‘full-scale war’, he turned to the ‘second phase’ of the civil rights movement. King was assassinated in Memphis, fighting for a ten-cent increase in the minimum wage for sanitation workers. All the debate on how much of his dream came to be tends to focus on only half of the dream. Between reduction to class and reduction to race, neither can be separated: it has to be both.
America is realising that the system doesn’t work for them. This is progress. We know now that this isn’t about bad apples. But it isn’t just about the branches that support them either. The sin is in the orchard; the poison is in the roots. The blade of the axe, alone, is not the solution. This time, the Economist may not ask what became of Black Lives Matter. But History demands that it go farther, still.