A year after the murder of George Floyd, there’s a lesson we’re missing.
Cultural Red Herrings: #MeToo Movement and Systematic Racism
Feminist icon, Susan Estrich famously said of rape victims “the tactic is always make her a slut or make her a nut”. Estrich, a USC law professor, has changed the course of rape trials in America. Long before the #metoo movement, Estrich battled with cultural red herrings that served as noise and distraction to the issue at hand. A rape victim’s sexual history doesn’t negate rape, a victim’s history of mental health issues, doesn’t negate rape. It took a long time but it is possible we’re in a new phase of thinking regarding police violence, and its close cousin, systemic racism. It’s not so different than what Professor Estrich noticed many years ago.
Perpetuating Dangerous Narratives for “Aggressive” Black Americans
Fear of black people perpetrating violence against white people is as old as America itself. Southern colonies were very careful in the way they controlled Africans on the North American continent. As much as the south loves guns, they hate the idea of guns for for black peoples. Gun ownership never seems to be a matter of liberty if one is black, it seems to be a point of fear for white people. The history of this idea goes on and on until it solidifies into a deeply entrenched tactic in the American judicial system, “say a black man did it”. Sadly, it has worked. In the case of Emmit Till, he didn’t actually have to do anything but a white woman said he did. Literature gave us the beloved Novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird” where saying a black man did something was enough to abscond a white woman of any responsibility for a situation gone horribly awry and send an innocent man to prison. Fast forward to the Rodney King trial where the world watch LAPD shamelessly and mercilessly beat a man on the ground, then be acquitted with absurd claims. They made the claims so many times it left America scratching their heads saying “wait, what? Well, maybe”.
The Michael Brown case which saw a young man shot in the back was excused with, “he smoked weed!” Yea, few things are as docile as a stoned doughy kid looking for snacks but the cop wasn’t charged. In the Trayvon Martin case, the young man was literally hunted by a mentally ill vigilante and the media talked about the handsome teenager’s “hoodie” and “love of rap music”. If you’re black in America, you don’t have to actually do anything, you just have to have a white person say you did something. The tactic is always the same “make him a thug or make him on drugs”. A tried and true defense for unspeakable crimes not just against an individual but against whole communities and humanity. This is the byproduct of criminalizing drug use and making it the boogie man, giving white people something to grab onto as a way to avoid the stain of racism that just won’t go away in American life.
Justifying Murder
The George Floyd murder and trial rattled America and set off a summer of protests not seen since the late 60s. It gave America pause to take a look at our relationship with the long-standing institutions and an opportunity to push our limits to a more perfect union but there’s a lesson that seems to be missed. America has always been a culture of assigning blame to black people, the drug war didn’t create that, it’s just the latest vehicle to get there. When the Floyd story broke it was an immediate chorus of verbalized fear: “He has a criminal history!” So, “make him a thug” followed by the inevitable “he was on drugs!” So make him on drugs. To be sure, Floyd’s life was not without problems, he had many run ins with the law and he had a long history of addiction issue but none of his issues are punishable by being summarily executed before the whole neighborhood, then the whole world.
Be it Brianna Taylor, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, or George Floyd, we are so fearful of dugs, we use drug use to justify murder? So the way to die smoking weed is to have the cops shoot you and then blame you? The drug war is racist, violent, and helps nobody.
The defense in the George Floyd case was that he was a thug, as it turns out, he really wasn’t. Yes, he had issues but he also played ball with neighborhood kids and prayed with people who he saw in distress. So in other words, he was a complex and comprehensive human, with both good and bad traits. While that defense has previously worked like a charm, it fell flat here. The defense also tried to say that Floyd overdosed, that it wasn’t the tactic of the officer that was the cause of death, it was Floyd’s choice to use drugs. Again, tried and true, that dog didn’t hunt in this case. What killed George Floyd wasn’t that he had a criminal history, it wasn’t that he was a drug user, it was a knee on his neck for over 9 minutes. The conviction came back quickly, decisively, and unanimously. Is this a new era in America life? Is this the beginning of the end of justifying crimes because someone is black and a drug user? It’s not likely that is a light switch than can be turned off and just go away but it may be the start of the era of an end of an era. The racial divide in America is likely not getting better while we have a drug war, a declared war on our own friends and neighbors. Let us hope the “make him a thug or make him on drugs” defense failure in the Floyd case, is an on-ramp to better policy and healing.