The murder of George Floyd (whether second degree or otherwise, let us not quibble about it) at the hands of Minneapolis police in the US sparked countrywide protests, spreading elsewhere in the world as well, with a loud and clear message that Black Lives Matter.
The United States is built on slavery and even after the Civil War (1861-65), supposedly meant to free slaves, and civil rights legislation of the 1960s, the country has kept coming back to dominate its black citizens, as it is ingrained in much of the white population of the country. And President Trump is a leading proponent of the view that the country’s administration at all levels– federal, state and everywhere-needs to dominate the protesters, as he said: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
He reportedly told the country’s governors, “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time.” And he added, “They are going to run all over you. You’ll look like a bunch of jerks.” Trump is the quintessential white supremacist, the kind portrayed in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, Between the World and Me. He writes, “‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our [black] bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, ‘white people’ would cease to exist for want of reasons”.
Today, Trump has become the symbol of a new version of Ku Klux Klan rallying white workers and others who increasingly feel anxious and disempowered in their country
In his celebrated book – which should be required reading for all those interested in the race issue in the US – Coates tries to answer all the questions about the cruel and humiliating situation of the country’s blacks in the form of a letter to his adolescent son. At one place in the book, he writes, ” … They [the whites] have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that they gave them their suburbs.” And they are not going to give up their privileged position of domination over the blacks, which is so much a part of their personal and institutional make up.
Here is an example of a black American diplomat recounted in a New York Times reporting of how ingrained is this attitude of looking down upon even blacks who might have made it to a ‘respectable’ position. It is about Tianna Spears, a black Foreign Service officer who resigned last year after making repeated-and unheeded-complaints of being harassed by Customs and Border Protection officers when entering the US from her assigned post in Mexico. The New York Times reported that in a blog post widely shared among diplomats, Ms Spears described being accused of looking like a drug dealer and carrying counterfeit identification, including her diplomatic passport. In other words, being black is being condemned to an image most whites have imbibed as part of growing up.
By staging such widespread protests against the killing of George Floyd, to Trump and his base, the blacks seem to be forgetting their assigned station in white America. And they might need reminding of this even if this meant using the military to clearly assert it. They shouldn’t forget that they live at the mercy of-as always-their white masters.
The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia