Today, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of three counts of unintentional homicide against George Floyd. That such a tragic event occurred in a city with a black police chief and a black federal Representative indicates racism may not be the most culpable co-conspirator. Already, most Americans have forgotten the other three officers at the scene, only one of whom was white: J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane, and Tou Thao. (Thao was sued in federal court in 2017 for unreasonable force, causing a 25,000 dollars taxpayer-funded settlement.) All officers involved in Floyd's homicide were low-level patrolmen--not detectives, not sergeants, and not lieutenants. After 19 years on the job, Chauvin was doing the same police work as someone hired one week prior. Had I less education, I would say Chauvin was a sh*thead working a sh*t job in a sh*t area.
Floyd was no role model, either. To minimize prejudice, the jury could not hear Floyd's prior convictions, including a guilty plea for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. Such imposed ignorance was reasonable given the lack of nexus between Floyd's death and his prior conduct, and I highlight Floyd's criminal record to show both men have more in common than one might assume. Chauvin, too, has a record: eighteen complaints, two reprimands. Chauvin is the product of a divorced home; Floyd was raised by a single mother. Chauvin is now divorced; Floyd was never married. Both men attended community colleges, then third-tier public universities. Both were in their mid-forties the day their paths crossed. Incredibly, they once had security jobs at the same nightclub, though no reason to interact, as one worked inside and the other worked outside. ("You had the house Negro and the field Negro.") If Floyd's death was tragic, then so was Chauvin's life: "'Nineteen years on the street is a long time, period,' said former MPD Chief Janeé Harteau. And 19 years in mostly the same place on the same shift is too long.'" Regardless of creed or color, we should be able to agree: no one, given a choice, would want the lives of these two men, which conveys a failure broader and more encompassing than race.
On the contrary, who doesn't admire Joe Elsby Martin of LMPD or Ferdinand Alcindor, Sr. of NYPD? It was Officer Martin, a white man in segregated Louisville, who introduced Cassius Clay to boxing, and then presumably to the white lawyers who would represent Muhammad Ali. It was Officer Alcindor who fathered and helped raise the boy who would become UCLA graduate, NBA Hall-of-Famer, and author Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Who invented Spock and the Vulcan philosophy of "infinite diversity in infinite combinations"? That would be Gene Roddenberry, former LAPD officer, whose father worked for LAPD.
Sadly, despite past luminaries, NYPD and LAPD are now recognized as two of America's most corrupt police departments. Multiple DOJ consent decrees, including one mentioned in Christopher Dorner's "manifesto," have been entered against them. As for Louisville Metro PD, it became infamous last year when officers shot and killed a sleeping (and innocent) Breonna Taylor in her bed. How did police departments morph from admiration to contempt on the same timeline that removed de jure segregation while subjecting police to greater oversight? Logically, the only explanation is that segregation, on a fundamental level, never changed, and judicial oversight failed to counter police unions' political influence.
“You think about the imposition of Jim Crow laws,” [Kirsten] Delegard said, referring to laws and customs in the post-Civil War South that separated black people from white. “It’s not just in the South, it’s everywhere.” -- from MinnPost article by Greta Paul (2019)
In the 1993-94 school year, less than 1% of Black students in the Minneapolis region attended highly segregated public schools--where 90% or more of the student body was not white, according to an NBC News analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Almost three decades later, in 2018, 25% of the region's Black students were attending such schools. -- NBCNews report (2020)
"Historian and author Richard Rothstein has studied segregation in education and housing in the United States for over 50 years, and in his book, The Color of Law, he shows that our segregated society is not the result of private activity or individual bigotry, but rather is a product of explicit government policies at the local, state, and federal levels..." -- Jeffrey Sachs
Indeed, an online search for "Minneapolis segregation" generates numerous links, each more disconcerting than the last. According to professor Myron Orfield's research, in 2015, low-income black residents in Minneapolis were 10 times more likely as Portland's black residents and over 5 times more likely as Seattle's black residents to live in high-poverty tracts. Read that again: we are referencing differences of 1,000% and 500+%. Oh, that black Representative I mentioned earlier? She's one of eight Minnesotan Representatives, and all seven of her colleagues are white.
America has a segregation problem resulting from the majority's desire to manage slaves after the Civil War. Racism is the effect, not the cause, of policies put in place by real estate agents, lawyers, judges, mayors, and police chiefs in response to free black movement. As long as America talks about race without fixing segregation, there will be other George Floyds and more Derek Chauvins. Both men are playing the same parts their ancestors played, a poor slave and a working slave, neither of whom was ever in control of his destiny. There is more than one tragedy here, but to see it, you must first admit every American is a part of it.
© Matthew Rafat (April 2021)
Bonus: "Historically, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese laborers from coming to the United States. Although the act was repealed in 1943, Chinese immigrants were restricted until 1965, when the National Origins Formula was abolished. Japanese Americans were interned in camps during World War II. Ms. Owyoung’s grandmother was not allowed to live outside Chinatown in San Francisco, and when the family moved to Oakland, it was prohibited from buying property in certain areas." -- Christian Science Monitor, by Francine Kiefer (April 20, 2021)
No comments:
Post a Comment