How many black deaths does it take for white people to start dismantling the supremacy that’s killing them?
It took about six minutes before George Floyd stopped speaking — nearly nine minutes before the officer lifted his knee from his neck. Captured on video from several bystanders and redacted footage from cameras worn by the arresting officers, Floyd’s final words were “I can’t breathe” and “Don’t kill me” before he went limp. The arresting police officers involved with his death claimed that Floyd was resisting arrest, though despite video footage from multiple sources, there are no signs of Floyd resisting or disobeying their instructions.
This is one of hundreds of instances in the United States in which police officers have killed black Americans — since 2015, police officers have killed 1,262 black citizens, 37 of which were children.
In 2014, the death of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, resulted in the Ferguson civil protests, giving rise to the #BlackLivesMatter activist movement on a global scale, a movement which began in 2013 after Trayvon Martin’s murderer was acquitted. In the same year, another black man, Eric Garner, was strangled to death by a police officer in a chokehold, his last words chillingly shared with Floyd: “I can’t breathe.” Both officers responsible for these deaths faced a grand jury. Both were not indicted.
It’s a cycle of supremacy we’ve come to expect from white men in blue: committing violent acts of police brutality against black suspects, killing them, releasing autopsy reports that try to emphasize toxicology or undiagnosed medical conditions as the culprit, eventually firing the killers, placing charges, and then handing them acquittals once the immediate attention dies down. Sure enough, the preliminary findings from George Floyd’s autopsy revealed that it wasn’t strangulation or asphyxia alone that killed him but the pairing of heart disease and the officer’s fatal use of restraint.
It is not surprising that Floyd’s autopsy report would reveal some underlying health conditions. It could have been asthma, a heart murmur, esophageal cancer — something to explain why he couldn’t survive Derek Chauvin digging his knee into his neck for nine minutes. It’s too harmful to hold cops accountable for their racism and brutality — it must be the bad, unhealthy black man’s fault for not having a body in profound shape, ready to endure a cop’s abuse. An independent autopsy released on June 1 contradicted the Hennepin County medical examiner’s claims, revealing that Floyd died from asphyxiation due to sustained pressure.
Since May 26, 2020, the United States has been ablaze in peaceful protests and furious riots. It never really matters whether the protests stay peaceful or evolve into riots — black people are repeatedly told to stay quiet and be respectful from white social media handlers. In 2016, Colin Kaepernick, an NFL football player at the time, knelt during the national anthem as a demonstration of solidarity with black activists. He later filed a grievance against the NFL for colluding to keep him from playing and was condemned online by white people and politicians for showing “disrespect” to a nation with a disparate inclination for killing black people. By rejecting his silent means of protest, Kaepernick and other black activists following in his stead were told that their suffering was meaningless.
White people are complicit in white supremacy, regardless of whether their morals are racist or not. The system that upholds Western government and police officers cannot be dismantled without white people joining the conversation and acknowledging the systemic advantages their white skin provides them. By clinging to concepts such as #AllLivesMatter, they are essentially saying all lives but black ones matter — because so long as black people are being targeted with poverty, imprisonment, and death at disproportionate rates, all lives are not equal. If white people are so earnest in believing that all lives have value, then it’s time to listen. Don’t dismiss protestors by simply branding them as angry looters, because it’s easy to ignore quiet and peaceful demonstrations — but the moment windows start breaking, suddenly there’s a soap box to preach on.
We expend sympathy on burning buildings and stolen merchandise, as if commodities aren’t insurable, replaceable, or less valuable than human life. The idea of losing stuff is more frightening than confronting our thoughts, unrecognized biases, and behaviours that have made black people in the United States killing fodder — and that attitude spills over into Canada too. Our history of anti-blackness is shrouded by feel-good stories, like accepting escaped slaves through the Underground Railroad, despite our 200 years of upholding black slavery before then. Our boast of multiculturalism and tolerance is a myth we’ve adopted as a nation.
White supremacy pervades Canada, though perhaps the saturation seems muted for those who choose to ignore it. It is surreal that a prime minister who wore blackface makeup has his racism shadowed by the hateful, racist rhetoric of his American counterpart, and instead, Canada is often regarded as one of the most tolerant countries in the world. Our history of anti-blackness began with slavery, transitioned into refusing black immigrants under the guise of their inability to endure our colder climate, and now today, in Toronto, black citizens are 20 times more likely to be shot by police than white citizens.
If you aren’t seeing the issues of race and the disparity that elevates whiteness and murders blackness, now is the time to start listening to black voices, reading black literature, and standing in solidarity with their calls for reform and justice.
Illustration: Kayt Hine/The Cascade
