Latest BLM protests are a turning point in the history of race in America
Is America making itself ungovernable, or is it just being governed by the wrong people? The question – usually rhetorical – has taken on an increased urgency in recent months in advance of November’s presidential elections. What is beyond conjecture is that the country is in a state of acute civil unrest. Four years of Donald Trump in the White House have left public opinion more divided than at any time since the 1970s.
In the nineteenth century, it was attitudes to slavery that defined the battle lines of the political landscape in the United States. In the first 60 years of the twentieth century, it was civil rights, Jim Crow and segregation. The Vietnam War laid down a new pattern. For the first time, the rights and wrongs of armed intervention in the affairs of another country were what brought demonstrators onto the streets. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that followed the terrorist attacks of 9/11 led to a renewed outpouring of concern, though this time round it had more to do with the manifest ineffectiveness and ill-directed nature of America’s response than with the motives of the President and his generals.
In 2020, in the middle of a Covid pandemic, we are back to race, with extreme prejudice on both sides – and the stakes are as high as they have ever been. Americans, outside of the obvious lobby groups and factions, are for the most part unmoved by their country’s support of, let us say, Israeli expansionism, rapidly deteriorating relations with China or giving Vladimir Putin backdoor access to the Oval Office. They may take opposing points of view on each of these questions. The fact is, unless they feel personally affected, they are not about to reach for their torches and pitchforks.
At home, the Black Lives Matter movement was dismissed by the Right, including the President, as the cynical exploitation of an imaginary problem. In the same way, when athletes “took a knee” for black rights at the start of games, they were condemned as troublemakers bent on overthrowing democracy. Time and time again across suburban America, in Democratic as well as Republican homes, the violence suffered by the US’s 45 million African Americans registered. In the social media age, people were often shocked by videos documenting acts of police brutality. But they quickly learned to look the other way.
Now, as is so frequently the case, it was an apparently random event that sparked the current crisis.
On May 25, George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was casually – almost absent-mindedly – killed by a Minneapolis police officer, who knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes as his life slowly ebbed away. It is no exaggeration to say that Floyd’s death was a turning point in recent US history. Black America responded in a way not seen since the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King by James Earl Ray, a White Power extremist, on April 4, 1968. People started seeing things differently that day, too.
Floyd’s final moments were filmed by shocked bystanders on their mobile phones. His dying words, “I can’t breathe,” became the expression of black anguish that was heard around the world. The smirk on the face of Officer Derek Chauvin, since charged with his murder, was seen by millions of otherwise uncommitted observers as proof that racism is alive and well in Trump’s America. Some welcomed this fact; many did not.
There had, of course, been other such incidents in the pre-Trump era. In July, 2014, with Barack Obama in the Oval Office, Eric Garner, was arrested outside a store in Staten Island, New York, for selling single cigarettes, known as “loosies”. The offence hardly merited a caution, let alone handcuffs. But minutes later, Garner was dead, the victim of an illegal police chokehold. He was wrestled to the ground by no fewer than five officers, protesting that he had done nothing and that, like George Floyd, he couldn’t breathe.
In March 2020, in Louisville, Kentucky – Mohammed Ali’s home town – Breonna Taylor, a hospital emergency-room technician, aged 26, was shot eight times and killed during a no-knock, overnight raid on the apartment she shared with her boyfriend. The police had been planning to arrest her black boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, on drugs charges. When the three arresting officers, using a battering ram, burst into their home, Walker reached for his legally-held handgun and fired two warning shots into the ceiling. The officers then rushed the couple’s bedroom and opened fire, killing Taylor in a hail of bullets. No drugs or drug money were found. Charges initially laid against Walker in the wake of the shooting were dropped, as was the original police claim that they had knocked, respectfully, at the door of the apartment and only broke in when shots were fired at them.
These were by no means isolated examples. In the last five years alone there were the cases of 18-year-old Michael Brown from Ferguson, Missouri, who was shot ten times following a confrontation initiated by the officer responsible; Natasha McKenna from Fairfax, Virginia, an unstable young woman tasered to death while in police custody; Philando Castiles of Saint Anthony, Minnesota, shot dead during a routine traffic stop; Tamir Rice of Cleveland, Ohio, shot dead at age 12 while playing with a toy gun; and Alton Sterling from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who was first tasered and then shot six times at close range while resisting arrest. All were black. All met their deaths at the hands of white officers, most of whom remain in their jobs.
The litany of post-Civil War racial injustice goes back a-hundred-and-fifty years. Lynchings were a commonplace in the South as recently as the 1930s. Segregation was routine when Bob Dylan recorded The Times They Are a-Changin’. Full civil rights in law were not conferred on black citizens until the reforms brought in by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But the extra-legal killings continued.
It was the death on August 23 of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old black man shot in the back seven times as he tried to get into his car in the town of Kenosha, Wisconsin, that (once more) proved the final straw.
Blake, who, astonishingly, survived the fusillade but is now paralysed from the waist down, with his intestines and bowels surgically removed, was subject to arrest on an open warrant for alleged offences relating to domestic abuse. On the night in question, however, it appears that the two officers who tried to detain him were unaware of his identity and were concerned only that he may, or may not, have been involved in a minor street altercation. As he got into his car, with his three young children in the back seat, one of the officers opened fire repeatedly, stopping only when Blake slumped forward, apparently dead.
America had been disturbed by the Floyd killing. But the Blake shooting, which went viral on YouTube, appeared wholly unconscionable. Nothing, it seemed, could ever justify what happened.
But more was to follow. During angry protests in Kenosha itself, a white, 17-year-old out-of-towner, Kyle Rittenhouse, armed with an assault rifle, decided to “protect” local businesses, in the course of which he shot two – white – protesters dead and seriously wounded a third. The police allowed him to pass through their lines unmolested despite the fact that he was carrying a rifle and protestors had identified him as the murderer. It was only the following day, as the incident led news bulletins across the nation, that he was arrested at his mother’s home in nearby Antioch, Illinois.
Since then, it was been disclosed that Rittenhouse – filmed applauding Trump at a rally in Illinois in January – was a member of his local police department’s Public Safety Cadet Program, which offers its teenage recruits “the opportunity to explore a career in law enforcement”.
Across the country, the black community, urged on by the Black Lives Matter movement, was incensed. Such killings used to be hushed up. It was a case of He-said-They-said. Now what took place could be seen on video. Rioting and looting spread like wildfire. Black politicians, church leaders and community activists were in no doubt that racism was once more in the ascendant and that any young black man who refused to defer to police authority risked summary execution.
What changed the dynamic was the intervention of multi-millionaire black athletes, from the National Basketball Association and the National Football League, who last week threatened to go on strike unless they were promised action to end the killings.
Now America had to listen. It was one thing for the usual suspects to come out swinging, but when Lebron James (a black icon with a net worth of $480m) announced that both his team, the LA Lakers, and their opponents, the Milwaukee Bucks, were ready to boycott the upcoming 2020 NBA playoffs, matters took a serious turn. It took frantic discussions between Trump’s son-in-law and special adviser Jared Kushner and his friend, the NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, to get the finale of the basketball season back on track, at least for now.
“I understand the pain, anger and frustration that so many of us are feeling in this moment,” Silver said in a statement. “These are incredibly challenging times. While I don’t walk in the same shoes as black men and women, I can see the trauma and fear that racialised violence causes and how it continues the painful legacy of racial inequity that persists in our country.”
While all this was going on, in Washington Donald Trump was preparing to deliver his speech accepting the Republican nomination for a second term as President. He decided not to mention George Floyd or Jacob Blake, or any other of the myriad of black victims, in his address. Instead, he singled out the plight of law enforcement in facing up to the “anarchy” of Black Lives Matters and pledged to defend, not defund the police. A day later, he announced that he intended to visit Kenosha to offer his personal support to… the police.
“In the strongest possible terms,” Trump told 2,000 GOP delegates gathered, unmasked, in the Rose Garden of the White House, “the Republican party condemns the rioting, looting, arson and violence we have seen in Democrat-run cities, all, like Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago and New York – many others – Democrat-run.
“There’s violence and danger in the streets of many Democrat-run cities throughout America. This problem could easily be fixed if they wanted to. Just call. We’re ready to go in. We’ll take care of your problem in a matter of hours. Just call.”
This was what his supporters wanted to hear. It was everything Black America expected to hear.
The remarks also brought back a rather chilling echo of Portland, Oregon, in July this year, where protesters, including many white sympathisers, were met by unidentified special agents from the Department of Homeland Security who were sent in by the Trump administration to clear the streets.
No one can say with any certainty how Trump will fare in the elections on November 3. The polls put his Democrat opponent Joe Biden in the lead, but the 45th President is both a doughty and a dirty fighter. It could yet be that it will be his stand on the race issue, allied to his blatant attempts to paralyse the Post Office in advance of mail-in voting, that will carry him over the line in the Electoral College.
Personally, I think not. I think the incumbent, for all his dark arts, is on his way out. But whether or not he is returned for a second term, the reality is that America has split into two almost-equal factions: those who want an end to the madness and those who want Four More Years. One thing we do know, however: very few among the country’s 45 million African-Americans will be ticking the box on the ballot paper marked Donald J Trump.