The Chauvin Verdict: Looking Backward

 

(zahlenparty.de; used without permission)

Derek Chauvin, the fired police officer whose flagrant killing of George Floyd in that city last May galvanized a summer of protest including here in Cedar Rapids, was found guilty of Floyd's death by a jury this afternoon. The Twin Cities seemed braced for disturbances had the verdict been unfavorable; so far there have been no reports of violence attendant to either protests or celebrations. President Biden praised the verdict, while suggesting we have a long way to go for what he called "basic accountability" for our black citizens.

Twenty-five years from now, will this sad event be seen as an inflection point in American history, setting us at last towards healing; or will it have been largely forgotten, another in a long sad series of racial violence? 

The Case for Forgetting

(1) The unique circumstances of the murder, including Chauvin's grotesque behavior, his disavowal by the Minneapolis police department, and a video by a teenage bystander that exposed the lies in the initial police report--mean it's unlikely to set a precedent for future trials. Fatal gunshots are easy to explain away as resulting from the heat of the situations, whereas choking a man to death over more than nine minutes requires a degree of malice that is harder to justify. In the last several days, blacks in Minnesota, Columbus, and North Carolina have been killed in police shootings, and video was released on a March shooting of a Chicago teenager. The officers involved may not be prosecuted, and even if they are, the prosecution is unlikely to succeed (see Balko 2021, Stinson and Wentzlof 2019).

(2) Fear, as Martha Nussbaum (The Monarchy of Fear [Simon and Schuster, 2018], esp. ch. 2) says, is a powerful pre-cognitive emotion, easily exploited/triggered by those with political agendas. Senator Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) is doing important work in leading congressional negotiations over a police reform bill, but it hasn't been that long since the consensus for reform after Floyd's murder broke down as then-President Trump sought to run for reelection as defender of the police (Millhiser 2020).

(3) The systemic racism that underlies all of these outcomes has deep roots, in long history, and won't yield easily to the gridlock and incrementalism the American political system typically produces. We are where we are because of slavery, the failure to support freedmen after emancipation, Jim Crow laws, violence like the Tulsa riots, redlining and exclusion from New Deal housing programs, and bulldozing black neighborhoods for intercity expressways. That's an awful lot to ask police, even reformed police, to fix.

Chicago neighborhoods before the Dan Ryan
(photo by author at the National Museum of American History)

The Case for Inflection

(1) Floyd's murder inspired a broad and diverse coalition of protestors, who may be able to sustain the political pressure they began last summer, and to translate their passion into institutional change. Many more people than before are aware of the daily dilemmas of our black neighbors, even in mundane activities like going for a walk (Alston 2020). Maybe this awareness will make it harder to gaslight us with looting and other false choices.

(2) The succession of horrific events, such as the three police shootings listed above, has enlightened more people that there's something systemic going on. This by now should be clear: it isn't just about  a few "bad apples" on the force, or a few bad actors in the neighborhood making bad choices. When it happens over and over and over again, it's a trend. This realization too may help to insulate people against fear-mongering.

(3) Police departments may yet come to realize they are more effective when they are working with, not against, their communities. Of the three types of power we used to talk about in political science--superior force, economic incentives, and psychological--it's psychological power, people's willingness to obey authority of their own volition, that can be projected farthest. But as John Locke pointed out centuries ago, people are only willing to obey the government to the extent that their rights are protected. When the police realize that operating from behind a blue wall only makes their job harder in the long run, and even start to advocate for social change, we'll be getting some place, a good place, a place none of us has yet been.

SEE ALSO

"Race Relations After the Pandemic," May 27, 2020

"Race Relations After the Pandemic (II)," September 2, 2020

"Race Matters, Damn It," April 16, 2013

Race relations after the pandemic

The last minutes in the life of George Floyd
(Source: The Daily Mail. Used without permission.)

About two weeks ago, City Lab posted a piece by Archie L. Alston II, an attorney in Virginia. Entitled "When a Walk is No Longer Just a Walk," it is a brutally frank, detailed account of what goes through the mind of "a large negro" preparing one evening to walk off a big dinner in the days after the February murder of jogger Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. Alston writes:

I grabbed my photo ID and my credit card, just in case. But my ID still had my permanent address in Richmond, Virginia, and I'm in Fredericksburg. That wouldn't help me. I grabbed the water bill to prove that I live in this neighborhood. I headed back toward the door, only to catch a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror. I probably didn't look like I lived in this neighborhood. Back upstairs I went. Almost by muscle memory, I threw on a University of Virginia hoodie and a U.Va. hat. Even racists love U.Va., or its home of Charlottesville at least. I contemplated throwing on my U.Va. Law hoodie but feared it may have been too much. Would someone feel intimidated and use that as provocation?

He concludes:

If a 43-year-old black man educated at an elite law school carries such a mental load when he exercises the most basic of his freedoms, then what kind of trauma must those who are less socially and financially secure experience? We suffer from trauma, and Ahmaud Arbery has reminded us that still, we wear the mask.

Alston's essay hit home because I've been walking in the evenings more than ever during the pandemic, just for the exercise. The most thought I ever put into it is whether I should take an umbrella. Alston and I are two men doing the same thing at the same time for the same reason, but sadly with very different experiences of it.

Now comes word from Minneapolis that four police officers participated in dragging a black man, George Floyd, from his car and putting him on the ground where one held his knee on his neck until he died of asphyxiation. They then filed a report that left out key details until they were busted by a cellphone video. The incident is plainly egregious--"It was malicious, it was unacceptable, there is no gray there," said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, but today police are teargassing and firing rubber bullets at protestors--and Minneapolis has its own history to answer for, but the problem of racist violence is clearly systemic.

This week there was this in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and this in Des Peres, Missouri. (Thanks to Dorothy Burge for drawing these to my attention.) 

Make it stop!

Source: City Lab. Used without permission.

In the wake of the Eric Garner shooting, Cedar Rapids attorney (and Coe graduate) Geneva Williams said progress on racial violence was impossible if "we no longer see ourselves in the other," and that it had become "harder to talk [to children] about race than to have the sex talk." In the wake of the Tamir Rice shooting, planner Annette Koh wrote:

Our naiveté borders on negligence if we don’t explicitly address how the very presence of certain bodies in public has been criminalized and the color of your skin can render you automatically “out of place.” Stop-and-frisk policies have criminalized an entire generation of Black and Latino youth in the name of public safety. What kind of places are we making in American cities where a 12-year old kid is shot in his own neighborhood park? (Koh)

Writers like Claudia Rankine (Citizen: An American Lyric [Graywolf, 2014]) and Ta-Nahesi Coatses ("The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," Atlantic Monthly [2015]) show that the impact of official and semi-official racial violence extends far wider than the dozens of deaths. Black health and black-owned businesses have suffered far more in the pandemic.

Meanwhile, there's Cliven Bundy and his band of thugs occupying federal land, for whom authorities waited patiently, and who were acquitted even of trespassing. People bring big guns to state capitols, egged on by the President of the United States no less, to protest anti-pandemic measures. They're white, of course. The police seemed more interested, at least at first, in a black birdwatcher in Central Park, called as they were by a (white) woman who wouldn't leash her dog.

 

What happens to race relations in post-pandemic America? The coronavirus pandemic could have one of three possible impacts on America's racial divide. It could bring us together in common effort; it could have drive us farther apart; or it could have no effect at all. If anything, when the pandemic has people on edge the danger seems heightened. Can young black men ever just go for a walk or a jog?

This seven-year-old blog has been focused on building community, on the premise that common life is the only way we are going effectively to meet the challenges of the 21st century world. It's also been about confronting the obstacles--economic, political, historic, and how we design our cities--that stand in the way of common life. Four centuries of tragic racial history are not going to disappear easily, or quickly, and even if everyone decided today to give up racism we would have to dig through all the economic damage from decades of exclusion, and heal all the PTSD people of color have accumulated. This at a time when the pandemic and the President are driving us into our separate enclaves. 

I've written in earlier posts about African-Americans in Cedar Rapids urging us to remain hopeful, and reminding us that Martin Luther King Jr. said "the arc of the universe bends towards justice." It is hard to feel that right now. We have no choice but to keep at it, but I don't feel at all optimistic this is going to work.

EARLIER POSTS

"Race Relations 2017," 20 June 2017

"The Latest Bad News and Our Common Life," 17 December 2014

"Are We All Ferguson?" 19 August 2014

"Race Matters, Dammit," 16 April 2013

[I wrote this before an eruption of arson and looting in Minneapolis Wednesday (Faircloth et al. 2020). All indications are that these were the work of a few thugs, the sort that prey on chaotic situations. There was looting, you'll recall, after 9/11, and in Cedar Rapids we had all manner of crap going on after the 2008 flood. These reprehensible actions should not lead to broad condemnation of the protesters, who had every reason to protest, nor to excusing the Minneapolis Police Department, whose response to the protests made a bad situation worse. Those responsible for arson and looting should be in jail (though I'd make allowances for people desperate for milk and water after taking tear gas). The men who murdered George Floyd should be in jail longer. The police department needs a thorough overhaul, starting at the top but not stopping there. Officers should live in the city, for starters.

We cannot live together in peace and security without law enforcement. We need to support the police with public policy and socioeconomic conditions that allow for the peace to be kept. The police must serve the entire community, and be accountable to the entire community. The Minneapolis force has failed spectacularly and tragically to do that.]