George Floyd Was Murdered
George Floyd was murdered by a police officer, it took less than 10 minutes for the life to leave his body. He had a criminal past that is reflected in countless other African American lives, sometimes it would appear to be the norm. I know three of my relatives that had similar backgrounds to George Floyd, most actually have a much longer and more violent rap sheet than Mr. Floyd did. One I know for a fact had a gun in his hands and had just killed someone when the police arrived. None of them have ever been abused or killed by police, and in my opinion, some do not deserve to still be alive given what they have done. George Floyd deserves to be alive and his family deserves to have a father, brother, and son returned to them, but that will never happen. Even the executions of all the police officers involved won’t bring George Floyd back, nothing can. As we march and yell his name, among the countless other humans that have been murdered by police it is as close as we will ever get to having them back with us. Their names are a weapon to be wielded by the people against the police and the government, we will let them know what they have done.
I have been thinking about this a lot and I have come to some conclusions based on my education, upbringing and life experiences. My degree is in social studies, with specializations in history and political science. I took as many classes on minority rights and their history in this country and the world as a whole as I could, suffice it to say that I am obsessed with finding, analyzing and judging the interactions between conquerors and the conquered. In the animal world, which we are very much a part of in my opinion but let’s say we aren’t for the purpose of this analogy, it is known as the predator and the prey. Those that are either outmatched in technology or numbers will be eaten and there isn’t much that can or should be done about that. A Ball python kills its prey by strangling it to death and then consuming it whole, it is uncomfortable to watch but doable. When I saw the video of that police officer killing George Floyd in the street as the other officers held his body down, my first reaction was to start weeping and screaming at the same time. My second thought was about what happens when a ball python doesn’t fully kill its prey before eating it or when you put a mouse in and it isn’t hungry, the mouse wins both times. The prey becomes the predator, I have been seeing a lot of this lately on national tv. Thousands of mice are rising up to stand up to the python that tries to squeeze the life out of them, and it fills me with unimaginable pride for my fellow humans. We are not mice and we are not sheep, we are humans, and that means that we can make the decision to never be prey or predator again.
I am her to let everyone know that here aren’t enough police in the world to stop what is happening right now in our country, it is changing and changing very fast. We no longer want to allow anyone to feel like they are a Python among a bunch of mice, no one deserves or can control that kind of power. Yet over the past 50 years or so we have been giving that power away in the name of civility and order, and for the last 50 years it has not been working. In the entirety of my short lifetime I have never seen it go on for more than a week without emitting a failure like what happened to George Floyd, I used to live less than 10 miles from Oakland California, but every black person that pulled into our small community was stopped by police shortly after entering town, I never understood why, as a kid my friends would always be talking with the cops when I pulled up to the skate park. They never seemed happy after they talked to the officer and whenever I talked with a cop it was like talking to an uncle. Now that I have grown and been educated I know that it was because they were all minorities and I was lucky enough to look white enough to not be bothered. I smoked the pot and spray-painted private property just like they did, but I wasn’t a threat because I looked white enough. What kind of grown man or woman is afraid of a bunch of teenagers with pot and spray paint, every single police officer that worked in my small childhood town. This is a community where it was expected that your parents would fund the public schools at $500 per kid, and those that paid had their name in a book that went around so you could know who didn’t pay. I know that this isn’t a rare scenario and I want to make sure that my readers know that too, in white communities this is pretty regular.
That was a teensy-weensy peak at the level of systematic racism that exists in ritzy neighborhoods in California, one of the most progressive states in the union I hear. I literally just shuddered imaging what goes on in communities in the south, I would bet my left f’ing nut that people who look off-white are not even allowed to set foot in some towns. The reason that you have never heard about it is another layer of the systematic racism, because everyone is involved. As I showed you in my childhood town the police are in on it and so are members of the community, even if they aren’t “racists” by their own definition. How would you feel if everyone else had 500 to put up for their kid to go to public school and you were one of maybe 10 families who couldn’t, the answer is, like shit. It doesn’t even matter if that isn’t the point of the little pamphlet that goes around, because the result is still the same not matter what. You will also notice that I lived literally on the other side of the hill to one of the crime capitals of this country, Oakland California. In our classrooms we got two sets of books one to take home and one to keep at school, I had friends who lived on the other side and they had to share their books, once again we all went to public schools. It gets worse, we didn’t send our old textbooks, that were barely used, to the kids over the hill. For some unimaginable reason my school would pay to send all of our old books to the Philippines, to help kids in need out, it was a yearly field trip and it made us all feel so good. Now when I think about it, it makes me physically sick, to think that my friends (one of whom just died to gang violence) could have had our books and the money to send the books to the Philippines but they never did. Small side note: I fully understand that he Philippines is a poor country that needs help with many things and I am not saying they didn’t need those books, but we had kids that I knew personally that needed those books and they never got them. The only reason that I can come up with is that the administration for my school district was systematically racist in its actions, maybe not racist but without a shred of a doubt in my mind classist.
I do not feel good when I stand over others for no reason other than that I have the privilege to be able to. I have zero doubt in my mind that I got into college by writing my way in because I was nurtured and my hand was held the entire time I learned to write, I have a natural passion that is more than most people I know but that’s not what gets you into college. None of my friends from over the hills have ever even applied to college because as they told me to my face when I told them I would pay their fees for application, “what the fuck is the point man”. There may be more to this struggle than race but it is the driving, determining and original factor that started this whole flawed and biased and racist and bigoted and, in its heart, fearful system.
That is the key to understanding racism, it is all based on fear in every level. White men are for the most part afraid of black men in general. That is a statement of fact and no one is going to like it very much but it is true. I have seen both men and women get on the other side of a busy street to avoid walking anywhere near a black man, and this was in the downtown district of San Francisco and everyone, even the black guy, yes really, had a suit on that cost more than my first car. I grew up with African Americans and they were some of my best friends throughout my middle school days, I never put them in any category other than the one I put myself in, poorer kids with skateboards. You want to know why we were able to afford that 500 bucks per child in public school, my father did some questionable cash work on the side, he was friends with a captain on a big police force in a neighboring community so he never had to worry about a thing. That is also systematic racism, most people in this country could never imagine the things that have gone on around me and I know I am not alone, which makes me think that maybe more people know what it is like than I realize.
The feet in the streets right now make me hopeful that more and more people will begin to realize what happens around them. If you don’t think that racism has ever played a part in your life you are wrong, it is as plain and simple as that. It exists in every corner of our society and in the last 50 years it has only been building to a climax that I truly hope is happening now because much more might lead to worse things than riots. Some people think of reparations as a bad word that has no place in our modern times, because money is central to our thinking and “we didn’t have slaves”. I don’t care about that sentiment and I don’t agree with it. This is my reparation to all minorities, by telling my stories of the injustice that I have witnessed and at times been unknowingly a part of, so that white people will at least have the opportunity to understand a fraction of the racism that goes on in our country and society. It is systemic it is still happening and one day it will stop. I ache for a day when I can stop writing about this, and I won’t stop until it stops, because this is what I can do. Now I invite you to ask yourself, what can I do?
