BLM protests add potentially consciousness-producing dynamic

The asphyxiation and murder of African-American George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, more than a fortnight ago has again placed race and racial discrimination firmly on the priority of humanity’s agenda.

Except for the most hardened racists, the sight of Chauvin’s full, uniformed body weight – the sign of governmental authority – pressed against Floyd’s neck as he lay handcuffed on the ground begging for his life, will remain the ultimate embodiment of cowardice, evil and barbarism.

Chauvin used a method known as “knee-to-neck restraint” which involves a police officer pressing their knee to the back of a face-down suspect to restrain them. Its dangers have been well known for a long time. The literature warns that knee-to-neck restraint is not to be maintained for more than a few seconds since it can result in serious injury or even death.

A report titled “Death From Law Enforcement Neck Holds” by doctors Donald Reay and John Eisele in the September 1982 edition of The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, reads: “Neck holds must be considered potentially lethal under any circumstance and used only when there is no other alternative.”

Reay and Eisele likened the method to the use of firearms where “the potential for a fatal outcome is present each time a neck hold is applied and each time a firearm is drawn from its holster”.

They concluded that the method “should be restricted to those situations where the officer or another person’s life is in immediate danger”.

That 30 years after such clear warnings, the knee-toneck is still being used in American policing, and that Chauvin could pin down Floyd for a total of eight minutes and 46 seconds, with the victim pleading “I can’t breathe”, testifies to the brutality of the 17,985 police agencies in the United States and their callous persistence in the use of violent and barbaric policing methods.

This was a slow and premeditated lynching.

Like SA, the US has a terrible history of racial segregation and discrimination in which the criminal justice system – starting with the police – has been an accomplice in the perpetration of the gross human rights violations against African-Americans. The institution of the police became an enforcement instrument to achieve outcomes which would be considered illegal and inhumane even by standards of many a jungle.

Consequently, the daily lived experience of African-Americans at the hands of the police in especially US southern states is worlds apart from the image of the US of the movies or carefully choreographed political speeches and other public presentations.

As a matter of state policy, the experience spans the period of slave patrols before the Civil War up to the end of the Jim Crow laws in the mid 1960s. However, the end of legal segregation did not come with a new criminal justice or policing culture.

Fragmentation of policing makes matters worse: each one of the nearly 18,000 police agencies has its own policies and oversight mechanisms.

Whereas the knee-to-neck has been outlawed in some US states since the 1980s, it is still widely in use in others; a deficiency in national norms and standards whose rectification in a federal and politically divided polity like the US would be no mean feat.

Nevertheless, the trend on police violence meted out, especially against African-Americans, has been consistent. Last year, the Mapping Police Violence Project, a nongovernmental research initiative which collects data on police violence in the US, reported that of the 1,098 people killed by police throughout the US in 2019, African-Americans constituted 24%, despite being only 13% of the population.

But to overhaul a centuries-old police culture that routinely murders young and old African-Americans in the same way that wild parks regularly cull game populations will require an inspired national effort to be sustained for many decades to come.

The momentum of the protests against Floyd’s murder have added a new, potentially consciousness-producing dynamic throughout the Western world. The apparatchik luminaries of the global system of racial capitalism have also become targets of protests.

Brussels’ regional state secretary for city planning and heritage, Pascal Smet, called for a debate on what to do with the statue of “the butcher of the [Democratic Republic of] Congo”, Belgian King Leopold II. Leopold’s statue in the city of Mons has been taken out of view and consigned to storage while protesters have demanded the removal of a bust from Belgium’s Leuven University library.

On Tuesday, a statue of Christopher Columbus in Boston city was beheaded and thrown into a lake. Columbus was a slave trader who, according to historian, Owen McCormack, is responsible for the deaths of more than three million native American Indians.

Also this week, protestors demanded the removal of a statue of arch racist Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College, one of Oxford University’s colleges.

It is too early to tell whether these measures against the symbols of racism and racial oppression add to an antiracist and transformative action in the West.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who believes that Floyd’s murder has presented an opportunity for police reform, last week gave a hint of the enormity of the task at hand.

“I am perpetually frustrated by how difficult it is to make changes,” he said. “I am perpetually frustrated about how hard it is to get that political machine, that governmental machine, to turn.”

He continued: “It is like a big freighter coming down the river and you can take the rudder and turn it all the way to one side but the freighter has such mass in and of itself that it just continues on its course and slowly starts to turn.

“I battle that every day. So I look for moments where the people can actually rise up to make changes so that the government officials say ‘Whoops! We better do something’ because the easiest thing to do is always to do nothing – the old expression that “the legislator who does nothing does nothing wrong.”

But the world needs no such good legislators, for black lives matter!

Mukoni Ratshitanga.

• Ratshitanga is a consultant, social and political commentator.

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