by Salma Mohamed,
Intern at the Advocacy Unit, SolidarityNow
The killing of George Floyd, a black man detained for allegedly using a counterfeit bill, by Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer, impelled by the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color, led to protests of widespread, systemic, and historic racial inequities across the world. Many of these inequities are produced by reincarnations of centuries-old practices. Coded rhetoric and de facto discriminatory legal customs have permitted and promoted state-sanctioned racial inequality in the 21st century with near impunity. While the United States is a pernicious and well-known perpetrator of this practice, the European Union, although it claims otherwise, has employed very similar techniques to oppress people of color.
On May 25th, 2020, Minneapolis police responded to a call reporting the use of a counterfeit $20 bill. Upon arriving at the scene, Officer Thomas Lane approaches George Floyd, a 46-year-old Minneapolis resident, proceeds to draw his weapon, and instructs him to show his hands. Officer Lane then grabs Mr. Floyd and pulls him out of the car, at which point Mr. Floyd resists arrest. After being handcuffed, Mr. Floyd ceased resisting and began apologizing to the officers several times. Then, the officers attempt to place Mr. Floyd in their police vehicle. Mr. Floyd proceeds to fall and states that he is claustrophobic. As they continue to attempt to place him in the vehicle, Officer Derek Chauvin pulls Mr. Floyd, who, as a result, falls to the ground again. As the handcuffed Mr. Floyd is face down on the floor, Officer Chauvin proceeds to place his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck. Officer Chauvin keeps his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for a total of 8 minutes and 46 seconds, during which, according to bystander-captured videos and court records, Mr. Floyd exclaimed more than 20 times that he could not breathe, said “you’re going to kill me, man,” and called out for his mother. About 6 minutes into Officer Chauvin placing his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck, Mr. Floyd became unresponsive. Despite this, Officer Chauvin did not remove his knee off the motionless Mr. Floyd for almost three more minutes. An hour later, Mr. Floyd was pronounced dead.
In the United States, black people are 3 times more likely to be killed by police compared to white people despite being 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed according to Mapping Police Violence.
The tragic killing of Mr. Floyd, Breonna Taylor (an unarmed black woman who was shot at least eight times and killed inside her own apartment by police), and Ahmaud Arbery (an unarmed black man who was shot and killed by a white ex-police officer while jogging), along with COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on people of color, primarily because of underlying disparities in healthcare, housing, and accessibility, impelled protests across the U.S. and then the world.
While much of what is happening in the U.S., especially under the Trump administration is unprecedented, the U.S. has a heinous history of racial violence and inequality. Many of the issues plaguing people of color today, as numerous scholars have argued, are morphed from centuries-old ideologies and practices to become more acceptable to modern ears. While these contemporary customs claim racial neutrality or justify discrepancies by erroneously shifting blame onto people of color, in effect, they are often anything but neutral.
Ideologies such as “law and order,” used by American presidents, and other politicians, instill a sense of fear and allow government officials to use the infamous pretext of national security to infringe on civil rights and liberties of marginalized communities; these infringements go virtually unpunished. This has allowed, and continues to allow, law enforcement sweeping authority, in essence, licensing police harassment and murder of people of color under the guise of racial neutrality, as evidenced by the war on drugs and stop-and-frisk laws in the U.S.
The U.S., in particular, does have a unique and pervasive history of racism, but, contrary to the assertion of Margaritas Schinas, a European Commission vice-president, the E.U. is also guilty of using covert tactics to maintain and promulgate systems of racial violence and disparity. In the wake of global race protests, Mr. Schinas discounts the existence of police brutality and systemic racism in the E.U. in an attempt to distance it from the U.S.
The mysterious death of Adama Traoré, a black man, who was in French custody, in 2016, and the more recent shooting of Muhammad Gulzar, a Pakistani man, at the Greek-Turkey border, in March of this year, are just two examples of racial violence in the E.U. Νumerous studies have found that racial and ethnic minorities are not only more likely to be stopped by police in the E.U. but also, as a United Kingdom report found, more than twice as likely to die in custody as a result of police force in the U.K.
The killing of George Floyd has raised a magnifying glass to the actions of states and state actors, depicting the repetitive use of concealed tactics to obfuscate the disproportionate treatment of people of color. Under the auspices of racial neutrality, governments get away with perpetrating various human rights violations, many of which have been transpiring for centuries. As such, while convicting the officers involved in the killing of George Floyd is a step in the right direction, we need to reconfigure our law enforcement systems and recognize the pervasive use of rhetoric to gaslight people of color around the world.