I’m drafting this entry while listening to a ‘Mindfulness’ webcast sponsored by my employer. Irony still exists but I am mindful of the shock and revulsion I feel watching George Floyd being choked out for 9 minutes.
The last 10 days have awakened a sense of dis-ease in me. I have been feeling rumblings of discomfort for a couple of years, but seeing someone get the life squashed out of them while the perp casually looks in his pocket for something (a pen? a stick of gum? his phone to check Insta?), paying little heed to the man he is calmly killing is jarring. Hearing Mr. Floyd call out for “momma” in his dying moment is at once heartbreaking and sickening given the actions (and inaction) of those sworn ‘to protect and defend’ him (and you or me) over that horrible 9 1/2 minutes. I want to look away but I know I shouldn’t.
We’re shocked and horrified. “This is unthinkable” we all say. Yet, I’m afraid it’s not so unthinkable, is it? Here it is in living color, there for us to watch over and over any time we want. It’s not unthinkable, there it is, right there. It’s not unthinkable because hard data tells us this happens quite regularly. We don’t know that because we aren’t exposed to it. If we saw it happen on the regular, maybe we’d think, “No, that happens a lot”, but that’s not our reality. It was George Floyd’s reality and now I see that it’s the reality of many many people I don’t know.
I don’t know what it’s like to live in fear of police. My paradigm is what I learned as a little boy: the policeman is your friend, but having a child who was a policeman exposed me to the daily life and constant fear that police feel that someone wants to kill them only because they exist. There’s a sick irony that Minorities feel the same about the police; they want to kill me just because I exist. Mix in abundant doses of suspicion and fear along with the ability to commit violence without significant repercussions (qualified immunity) and tacit or explicit support from your coworkers, and you have a pretty toxic recipe for disaster.
So we have a police culture of violence, often justified violence, the shield of qualified immunity for protection from a litigious society, workplace reinforcement of violence, and based on some 1st hand observations on my part – a pervasive paranoia that is often justified. Combine that with a persecuted citizenry with the deck stacked against them before they are even born and generations of reinforcement of subjugation and I can see easy repetition of tragic outcomes.
Dwelling on the police/violence/subjugation angle, I’m afraid I’ll lose sight of my main point: The only reason George Floyd’s murder is unthinkable to me is: I never (had to) gave the Minority experience significant thought before I saw a flat-out murder take place with my own eyes.I didn’t have to… It is quite ‘thinkable’ to those who already lived in that reality.
Brain Particles 