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Jun 8, 2020 · George Floyd is not the first African American whose death in police custody sparked protests. There were also rallies and calls for change after Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and Eric Garner were...
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MINNEAPOLIS — By Tuesday afternoon, the intersection of 38th Avenue and East Chicago Avenue where George Floyd died had become a kind of shrine. People — black and white — trying to express something, trying to see something, perhaps trying to wrestle with their feelings.
It was so much a space to see and be seen, to emote and to engage with those of like minds, that a kind of photo backdrop — a black-and-white image of George Floyd's face on plywood — had been stationed on the street. As Kendrick Lamar's "Alright" played on a loudspeaker, a line formed. Many posed and smiled.
But when Corey Yeager, a black man and psychologist for the NBA's Detroit Pistons, approached with a group of young black men clad in T-shirts emblazoned with the words "I Can't Breathe," all five, ages 12 to 19, knelt and raised their fists. Yeager suggested they also bow their heads. Within seconds a crowd of mostly white observers began snapping photos and recording the moment on video. From the crowd, there was even a "Yaaas."
"This, this situation here, is the depths of despair," Yeager said. "Our situation is grave. If you are black, born in America, you have and will experience trauma. This is a country where a black man can be murdered for jogging, a black woman can be murdered while sleeping, and then there is George Floyd and the many, many George Floyds."
In the parlance of the internet, the past week has been a year. So much has happened to shock those optimistic about the state of racial equity and affirm those always in tune with the persistence of racism in American life that the strain of the last 10 days has been extraordinary.
But black Americans are exhausted. They are grieving. They are angry. They have, in many cases, grown tired of being forced to make the case for their citizenship, their humanity, their very survival — again and again over the course of generations.
Just the recent roll call of tragedy is disturbingly long. In Minneapolis, a collection of 49 names — a partial list of black men and women who have died in encounters with police or white private citizens since 2006 — stretches down Chicago Avenue. It also includes the name of an Asian man. Most are not names known to many nonblack people in the United States. The following day, Ben Crump, a lawyer for Floyd's family, recited most of them off the top of his head. They are, for much of black America, a familiar litany.
"They are all different, different people, different circumstances and cities," said Phillip Atiba Goff, a psychologist who uses data to study race and policing in the United States. "The reason that they feel connected, like part of a long list, is that they all stem from the same thing: that is, America's original sin, white supremacy. It's part of who we are as a nation, and, apparently, even during a period of distress never before seen, it surfaces again and again."
Goff, who is black and the co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, worked to help transform the Minneapolis Police Department, in which the center found vast racial disparities in all sorts of policing activity, Goff said. (The city declined to make the report public.) A previous police chief, Janeé Harteau, was persuaded to make changes after working alongside local activists and some elected officials.
Beginning in 2016, the list of changes included, for the first time, tracking the race and gender of drivers stopped by police and reporting use-of-force data online, requiring officers to activate their body cameras the minute they respond to 911 calls and deeming officer refusal to cooperate with an investigation as a form of misconduct. Officers were also directed to issue repair vouchers to drivers stopped for broken taillights and to stop arresting the homeless for congregating in warm spaces. Those types of tickets and arrests can lead to mounting fines, fees and involvement with the criminal justice system. The changes helped make residents feel that their neighborhoods were safer, researchers found.
The same year, the department implemented its "duty to intervene" policy, requiring officers to stop colleagues from using excessive force. Based on the policy, Medaria Arradondo, Minneapolis' current police chief, fired the three officers who witnessed Derek Chauvin pin Floyd down with his knee for more than eight minutes before he died. (On Wednesday, the three were charged with aiding and abetting murder, and the murder charge against Chauvin was elevated to second-degree, from third-degree.)
The changes were part of a three-year, $4.75 million, six-city initiative funded during the Obama administration. When President Donald Trump took office, funding for the research and field work ended — along with federal consent decrees requiring legal and less abusive ways to police several other communities.
In 2011, J. Drew Lanham wrote about his love of birding and the constant need to try to anticipate, accommodate and push against white suspicion in a publication run by AfroOutdoors, an organization of mostly black outdoor enthusiasts who work to ensure that the beauty and benefits of nature ought to be accessible to everyone. Lanham grew up in rural South Carolina and can remember being fascinated with birds even as a 5-year-old.
"Birds are free to go anywhere they want without any of the limits we know of, and I have always envied that, and I think I'm not alone," said Lanham, who is black. "For black folks, simply being in this country has been an exercise in not being fully free. I think that may be why if you read the narratives of enslaved people and people who were liberated, you will see a lot of references to birds and watching birds. Their beauty, the freedom inherent in their flight, the melody of their songs, is a metaphor for freedom."
Lanham is friends online with Christian Cooper, the black birder involved in the Central Park incident with the white woman who was walking her dog and called police to say she was being threatened by an African American man.
Lanham was not surprised by the details of that encounter, because he has had similar experiences most of his life. He's an endowed professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University, yet he avoids going to the place closest to his home where he could spot his favorite bird because of an experience he had two years ago.
A white man who owned property in the area struck up a conversation with Lanham, telling him that his family had been there for generations, Lanham said, and that the "n------" who used to pick and gin the family's cotton certainly knew how to do the job.
Lanham recalled the man adding: "That's just how it's meant to be. Some people are better at some things than others." He added that he hated trespassers and let Lanham know he was armed. It was a threat disguised as a chat, Lanham said. As Lanham drove away, he heard the man firing a gun behind a nearby barn.
- Reporter
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