A tall and African-American man, George Floyd graduated from high school and attended college on sports scholarships for several years before leaving. He was just as talented in sports, including basketball and football, as he was in rapping, where he tried to build a career. But hard times caught up with him and for many years he was involved in minor, and sometimes not so minor, crimes. But eventually his life turned around and he went to Minneapolis from Houston to look for opportunities. While continuing to fight opioid addiction, he remained employed in various positions, campaigned against violence and participated in charitable activities. He had a young daughter and a girlfriend, Courtney Ross. They first met when he saw her crying at a Salvation Army facility. He comforted her and invited her to pray with him.
All racism is built on false narratives. They are easy to create and the results can be devastating. Donald Trump’s racist attack on people of Asian descent, denouncing the coronavirus as “Kung flu” and “Chinese flu,” has prevented a rapid and devastating surge of anti-Asian violence in the United States. Not too long ago the anti-Islamic campaigns led to mass murder of Sikhs in the US and Muslims in prayers in New Zealand. Anti-Semitism prompted the shooting deaths of worshipers in a US synagogue.
Sometimes these narratives become so engrossed, over such long periods, that they become difficult to erase. In the United States they carried on slavery, Jim Crow, and now the mass incarceration and killing of African-American police. They are found in India against Muslims and others, in Hutu / Tutsi love in Burundi and Rwanda, and, more recently, in Myanmar against Rohingya Muslims. These narratives exist in many countries as well as ours, often inflamed by political rhetoric. He has been responsible for nearly sixty years of ethnic violence. There is always an economic foundation, of course, that leads to political exploitation.
The images leading up to the killing of George Floyd tell a very different story to the one the defense team is trying to portray. We see him buying without incident at Cup Foods. He may not have been sober, but he was not threatening in any way, disputing a shop assistant for a sport while he bought cigarettes and paid for it with a $ 20 bill, which he allegedly faked but doubted he knew.
Then the scene suddenly changed. George Floyd is sitting in a car, confronted by a police officer, with a gun drawn, as he pleads with the police officer not to shoot him. Later, we see him standing up hand-bagged. Then he was sitting on the sidewalk, crying, as he gave his name and spelled it out for a policeman, who didn’t seem to know how to spell “George.” By then he was no longer treated as a man, or perhaps he was, but as a human detritus. Disturbed in the police car due to claustrophobia, he was only a short step away from the knee on his neck. Derek Chauvin, on trial for Floyd’s murder, may not have found humanity. That is, he did not see George Floyd as a man.
The ropes that emerge from these false narratives are fully featured at trial. We heard the distressing portions of the cross-examination by eyewitness defense of a deep traumatization prosecution, one child, two 18-year-olds, still riddled with guilt, two elderly men and an elderly woman, most breaking to down in tears. The evidence revealed that Derek Chauvin had his knee on George Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, as the small crowd pleaded, some angry, to stop.
Even the doctors, when they arrived, had to ask Chauvin to remove his knee from George Floyd’s neck, long after Floyd became a limp. Floyd is referred to as a “big” man, who had to be restrained, suggesting to the trope of the big, angry, Black man. The anger of the crowd is spoken of as if it were a large disorderly crowd, replacing a group of about seven people, many of them children. The film shows that Chauvin remained insane and unmotivated by the shout of mercy from the small group, as he stared merrily in their direction, while the torture continued.
The big, angry Black man, the scary crowd, the drug addict, or the ‘super-predator,’ all add to the racial narrative painted by George Floyd as if it were the case of George Floyd, for causing her own death. The next step would be not to die from suffocation, but from the drugs in his system.
The jury is asked to disarm a man, lying on the road, being smoked by a policeman’s knee on his neck, repeatedly complaining that he could not breathe, as he reached back to his childhood, calling out for his long-dead mother, in vain calling on primordial, powerful and enduring human instincts, mother’s love, to protect and save him from what he already knew was about to happen – that he was going to die.