JustThink: Was George Floyd White America’s Sacrificial Lamb?

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A year has passed.

And George Floyd is larger & more heroic in death than he ever could be in life.

The system already had him pegged, tried & convicted of a life of petty crimes —yet his merciful cries of anguish to breathe & for his mother, under the weight of a police knee, became the change we needed.

The catalyst —to move America’s heart.

To rip off the veil of white supremacy & racism that hide behind a police badge these days instead of a KKK hood/mask, as it did in the past.

Underneath the masks, badges, and hoods, they are all the same: angry white men, trying to exert their manliness through power over the oppressed Black Other;

Behind the hoods/masks/badges are also angry white women who feel entitled to accuse, challenge, and police Black bodies in their role as citizens, teachers, shoppers, passerby’s on streets or in parks, and exert white privilege that really obscures their own experiences of gender oppression.

These white women give birth to and/or nurture — as aunts, uncles, cousins,neighbors — confused white children who mimic white adults and assault & ridicule the Other — whatever form they take — Black, Indigenuous, LGBTQI, Trans, Muslim, Asian — .

Rewriting History and Ignoring Facts

There is a deliberate attempt underway by white political leaders to re-establish whiteness as the rule of law and to rewrite history as we know it, while ignoring documented facts.

Slavery was real.

Not teaching about it will not erase the fact that it existed in America. Or that the wealthy in this country owe their vast wealth to the exploitation of Indigenousness and Black bodies, broken treaties, and the appropriation of natural resources that did not belong to them.

The overarching goal of this modern-day whiteness agenda is to re-inscribe a white supremacist version of the past that centers white as always right. It is a false narrative about the founding of America, along the lines of the 1915 film, “Birth of a Nation” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation ).

Through such a lens of white supremacist history, the now controversial Confederate statutes make sense. They symbolize the beginning of a false history.

The Big Confederate Lie

The Confederacy (comprised of Southern States) lost the American Civil War. But the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) created monuments to celebrate the losers (their sons, husbands, brothers, uncles, cousins, and neighbors) and promote them as heroes. Notwithstanding their traitorous efforts to dissolve the “United” States and maintain the system of slavery!And after the Civil War ended and enslaved Blacks were emancipated on Juneteenth, southern state governments had no problem complying and allowing the DAR to perpetuate the lie of Confederate heroism.

The truth and facts are this: those who fought in the Confederacy were no heroes. They were losers, yet there are numerous statutes to commemorate and honor them spread throughout southern states.

In the south, the Civil War never ended. It simply went underground and maintained its power through public symbols— Confederate flags, playing songs like Dixie at public events, and an abundance of larger than life Confederate statutes!

What other country, in the world, allows its former enemy to place statutes, which depict the illusion of heroism, in its public squares and on its college campuses, after a loss?

The big Confederate lie — embodied in its symbols of flags and statutes — outshone the known fact that the South lost the Civil War.

Until recently, such symbols were revered. Now, their very existence simply prove the persistence of racism in America, 300 years after slavery, 150 years after legalized segregation in the form of Jim Crow laws, and ongoing social, political, health, and economic disparities.

Today’s Reality Check

Fast forward to our times — today. It is a year and a months after George Floyd’s murder by police, five months since new and diverse political leadership was installed and the racially devisive 45th president left office, and one month since a jury lf his peers found Derek Chavin, Floyd’s killer, guilty.

What Now?

Despite the change in national leadership, there are warning signs that all is not well in America. It appears that the ghosts of the Confederate past have infected contemporary politicians.

Under some delusion of white racial hierarchy, white politicians are using their white political privilege to orchestrate a historical lie and make it law.

They seek to ignore the atrocities perpetrated against Black and Indigenous people to build this country — this United States of America. Rather, they are putting forth a narrative that seeks to legitimize and make righteous all white egregious actions of the past. They want critiques of white American to be silenced and/or punished.

They want to restore the white supremacist history of the pre-1970s before Black Studies was institutionalized.

These legislative actions must be viewed as power assaults against democracy and a deliberate attempt to return us to the Jim Crow era, where whites controlled the public Master narrative of America’s history.

One example is the state of Arizona that banned the teaching of Ethnic Studies in public schools. White lawmakers want to pretend that Latinx — and anyone else — have no history, except the one white people choose to write.

The State of Iowa is wants to cement a white gaze of history and legally punish any public educator or school system that dare teach about the 1619 project. (Iowa House File 222: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/education/2021/02/09/iowa-lawmaker-claims-1619-project-leftist-political-propaganda-should-banned/4355885001/) — anything to preserve whiteness.

Such actions can never hide the fact that the political,economic and social wealth infrastructure of today’s United States is the built on the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of African bodies, the immigrant labor of Chinese building the railroads, and Latinx migrant laborers.

Pretend all you want. Facts are facts, and they cannot be hidden forever!

Were these lies/false narratives/real fake news/revisionist history of omissions circulating in Chauvin’s mind and those of his co-conspirators when they murdered George Floyd.

Perhaps, though not consciously. But that is the power of white supremacist thinking. It is embedded in the psyche, lurking silently in the unconscious mind, and waiting quietly like an aneurism to burst.

Those who have imbibed racial hierarchy need only the most minor excuses — fake $20 bills, traffic stops, unpaid traffic tickets, fleeing from deadly police — to flex their assumed superiority muscles and put down anyone who is Black, brown or Indigenous. You add other layers of identity — gender, sexual orientation — and the response of racialized hatred is heightened.

White police (and even women and non-white police in uniform) fundamentally believe that the badge they carry is designed to shield and protect them, even when they are deadly wrong and even when they make deadly mistakes — shoot a gun instead of a taser or walking into the wrong apartment and killing the legal occupant.

They are comfortable that the justice system is designed to always ensure their white innocence and protect them.

The trigger for this unjust system is simply uttering that white magical phrase — “I Feared For My Life. Wherever Black, brown and indigenous bodies are present, this white supremacist incantation is sufficient to hand any white a “get out of jail card.”

We have witnessed this trend of excusing white violence against non-whites happening over, and over, and over again. It began in slavery and continues into the present. The history of the white American justice system is one that exonerates police violence specifically and white violence in general.

Today’s police are simply yesterday slave patrollers — paddy rollers — with one prime directive: the control of Black bodies and any non-white bodies by any means necessary.

America’s Latest Victim of White Racial Hate — Asians

Of late, Asians, who too often pass as “honorary whites” or “model minorities,” have felt the oppression and wrath in the form of anti-Asian hate. It is tragic, for no one deserves to be oppressed.

But we must acknowledge how their honorary white status resulted in immediate Presidential Executive Order to stop anti-Asian hate crimes.

Yet, after hundreds of Black deaths and centuries of white assaults on Black, there is NO “Stop Anti-Black Hate”legislation or Presidential Executive Order to stop the violence against Black people date. Case-in-point, Blacks must fight to get the Civil Rights Act reauthorized.

Inequality Within Oppression

In less than two months, over a Billion dollars was raised to support Asian groups fighting injustice. It has taken over a year to raise money for #BlackLivesMatter and #Stop Anti-Black actions; but these efforts have yet to reach over a Billion dollars!

Even within the oppression realm, there is a hierarchy ladder and Black people are still on the bottom rung.

This is America’s signature. It privileges every group’s oppression over the most egregious of its actions in the past and in the present against Black people and Indigenous people.

Yet these are the two groups that have lived with and suffered from the most police brutality and who bear significant generational wounds of economic, health, political, and social trauma and disparities that no other non-white group living in this country today has ever experienced.

Until America deals righteously with racial reckoning and signs into law Stop Anti-Blackness Hate and Stop Anti-Indigenous Hate, then very little has changed.

Until America gives Reparations to Black and Indigenous people -like they did to Asian Americans interned in WWII — for the free labor we provided for generations to build this country, America can never move forward.

Until America holds itself accountable for what the land of the free and home of the brave allowed to occur under its banner of laws, then it means that George Floyd’s death may have been an unnecessary sacrifice.

I pray not. A lot of change has occurred:

• New, young Black leaders emerged. #Blacklivesmatter is now a universal rallying cry;
• Defund the police and other alternatives are on the discussion table; and
• George Floyd’s name has become a GLOBAL symbol of the reality of racial injustice, of which his family can be proud.

Let George Floyd’s tragic and unnecessary death, and those of other unarmed Blacks, not be in vain.

Don’t make George Floyd America’s sacrificial lamb.

Let us take action, move beyond diversity pleasantries and move forward as a country to do whatever it takes to make sure such deaths by police never happen again.

America must publicly acknowledge the racial harm it has inflicted upon generations of Black people (men, women, children, and Trans).

Only then will George Floyd’s death be more than an unintentional sacrifice. Only then can America do better. Only then, can America be better!

(c)2021 Irma McClaurin. All Rights Reserved