On the day of George Floyd’s funeral, we offer these timely musings by Professor Larry Hudson.
Recent events have left us saddened, shattered, and totally bewildered. The devastation of the ‘novel’ coronavirus, and the seemingly overnight cessation of our normal way of life, have shaken us and cast doubts over old norms. The explosion on our TV screens of George Floyd’s death at the hands (or knees) of four Minneapolis police offices, (some term it a “low-tech lynching”) has further shocked us and raised questions about the workings of one of our major institutions.
If black Americans were shocked at the brutal treatment meted out to George Floyd, they were not surprised: the long decades of post-slavery policing, punctuated by lynching and other quasi-legal acts cemented in black minds an understandable fear of police, and a distrust of communities happy to concede to law enforcement agencies the authority to maintain good order and the racial status quo. In these political and social arrangements, the means were less important than the desired ends. Not surprisingly, while few black people interact with police officers without some trepidation and fear, the vast majority of white Americans not only do so with the expectation of protection and service, most were accustomed to dismissing claims of excessive force against the police.
More than any other institution, police forces have divided communities and placed white and black Americans on opposite sides. This divide had showed some signs of shifting after documentary evidence of police officers behaving in ways that more and more of us considered both inappropriate and racially motivated. Among the most televised examples of police disregard for and brutalization of black bodies was the violent beating of Rodney King in 1991 by officers of the Los Angeles Police; the 2014 choking of New York’s Eric Garner’s; and a year later, the cold disregard for Michael Brown’s body, lying lifeless in the middle of a Ferguson, Missouri street.
Our collective drift away from our normative behavior over the past few months has trespassed onto this murky minefield of black and white relations with the police. George Floyd’s last words have touched us all—touched us so deeply that they might very well bring about fundamental changes in policing at the local and federal levels; changes in our general perception of our police forces and how they perform their duty to all us, irrespective of color or class; and, at a subterranean level, even changes in the way we approach our nation’s history of race.
The inner workings of the police (currently and by extension into the past) have been unflatteringly exposed for all to see. Police officer Derek Chauvin’s knee has narrowed if not entirely eroded the racial perception gap. Changes in police departments around the country are on the way, and, hopefully, multi-racial reform groups, given new weapons, will soon assault those other institutions that have played such crucial roles in maintaining a two-century old unequal racial order.
As we so often say in our classrooms, “this is a teachable moment.” The caliber of this monumental moment—the killing of George Floyd--provides a perfect-storm of opportunity, both to remedy past injustices, and to begin to re-calibrate the very way we teach our students the about past.
For further reading:
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide
Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption