One year ago today, George Floyd was placed under arrest, ostensibly for buying a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit $20.
Maybe he didn’t know the bill was bogus. Maybe, when the police swooped down on him and tried to take him into custody, he was uncertain as to why.
Whatever the reason, Floyd apparently resisted arrest, put up a struggle and ended up with ex-Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee on his neck for 9 ½ minutes before he died.
The justice system dealt with Chauvin, and within the next month we’ll know the price he’ll have to pay for the excessive force he used.
Floyd’s murder was the latest — at the time — in a spate of violence perpetrated against people of color by white people. Some were members of law enforcement, others were by self-styled vigilantes whose acts would have gone unpunished were it not for public pressure. Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, but there were similar crimes committed against Black people in Georgia, Kentucky and other places we probably don’t even know about.
However, Floyd’s murder seemed to be the proverbial tipping point in the rekindling of the Black Lives Matter movement, which started in 2013 after George Zimmerman was tried — and acquitted — of killing Trayvon Martin in Florida. It became a nationally-recognized movement a year later after Michael Brown was shot dead outside of St. Louis by police, and Eric Garner died after police placed him in a chokehold in New York.
This being the 2020s, BLM — as it was resurrected last May — was immediately placed under a political microscope. Showing support for BLM was seen in some circles as being anti-police. All of a sudden, on one side of the street there were Black Lives Matter demonstrators, and on the other side Blue Lives Matter, whose members felt that the sacrifices made by police officers went largely unacknowledged. Once a week through most of last year, these two sides visibly clashed on Humphrey Street near the Lynn/Swampscott line.
There was some progress, of course. In Massachusetts, a comprehensive police reform measure was passed in the legislature and signed by Gov. Charlie Baker. As with anything else, the bill wasn’t universally applauded, but it was at least some acknowledgement that the issues brought up by the BLM movement were legitimate.
But elsewhere, it was as if you couldn’t support your local police department and sympathize with Black people who feel they are unfairly — and in some cases fatally — treated differently than white people in similar circumstances. Dylann Roof was taken without incident for shooting up a Charleston, S.C. church. James Eagan Holmes killed 12 people and wounded 70 in a shooting spree at an Aurora, Colo., theater. He was captured alive.
Yet Eric Garner is choked to death for selling loose cigarettes in New York? George Floyd is killed for possibly flashing a counterfeit $20? Can’t people see the incongruity there?
There should have been enough food for thought in all of that for reasonable people to be able to pick out the salient issues. Instead, any of those salient issues were totally dwarfed by the extreme rhetoric. All of a sudden, people demanding social justice after having dealt with systemic racism for most of their time in this country were branded as socialists (which, apparently, is the dirtiest of dirty words in this country if you want to mortally damage someone’s reputation).
But then again, I always looked at the word “socialist,” at least as it is applied in modern-day American politics, as a racist dog whistle. I recall the word was used often to describe former President Obama, and not because of any similarities he had with Karl Marx.
Call someone a socialist and you can practically print an entire profile on that person. Besides, half the people who throw that word around wouldn’t know the definition if it came up and bit them.
In the end, dueling Black and Blue Lives Matter movements became just two more elements of modern-day American life inextricably damaged by politics and propaganda.
And that’s too bad. There should not be any more doubt that systemic racism not only existed in the United States, but still exists. There should not be any more doubt that it has seeped into every aspect of our lives, including, yes, law enforcement.
And there should not be any more doubt that we’re either going to have to come to terms with it, or be eternally cursed by the problem and its ramifications.