George Floyd and White Supremacy
The fact that the United States was founded upon slavery and segregation, meaning upon violence and hence created from an original sin, explains why a white police officer can kill a black man in broad daylight. This goes without saying in a country where cleverly constructed stereotypes have said for centuries that Black people must be mastered and dominated. From this original sin was born a biased perception of Black people, which continues to be knowingly maintained by Whites. For them, the Black is therefore only the imaginary entity that they created for themselves. Thus, the United States was created, on a fundamentally racist basis, by and for the Whites against the Blacks.
Racism in the American state is institutionalized and has become the engine and cornerstone of inequality. As such, America was originally created to be what I call the “United States of Anguish,” in which surveillance has been entrusted to individuals like Derek Chauvin, George Floyd’s killer, reminiscent of a Ku Klux Klan soldier disguised as a police officer. He is only one of the faces of this structural racism. Remember that the historic mission of the white American police officer was to watch the Negro and ensure that segregation was proceeding successfully. Perhaps we should ask whether it is reasonable to expect that a country built on such foundations would bring about non-racist beings, given that it is the culture and habits that shape these beings.
Segregation remains alive and well despite Black people’s struggle since slavery. The housing system is racist. The justice system is racist. The financial system is racist. The education system is racist. The health care system is racist. The political system is racist. And right now, the black community is facing two viruses: systemic racism and COVID-19. The latter has disproportionately affected and killed people in the Black community, which is also a consequence of racism and an indication of its prevalence.
The death of George Floyd has revealed to the world an extensive cultural problem, one that we are ill-prepared to conduct in Western countries. One chooses not to understand that what authorizes a white police officer to kill a black man without blinking is a Western culture that operates with impeccable stealth and pervasiveness. We especially do not want to see its close link with our history and, therefore, with the imaginary that we created for the benefit of some and at the expense of others. However, throughout the West there is still a way to be outraged and vehemently condemn attitudes like those of Amy Cooper, the white woman who, a few weeks ago in Central Park, New York, furiously told a black man that she was going to call the police to tell them “that an African-American man was threatening her”. The story of that Black man, whose life was almost left in the hands of a notoriously racist police system, simply because he had asked a white woman to comply with the law and to keep her dog on a leash, clearly shows us the relationships that Western societies have with non-white people and how they see the police as a natural ally.
I, who have never had a problem with the police and am not violent, have already been threatened by at least one of my white ex-girlfriends, who wanted to call the police amidst the most mundane disagreement that almost all couples face. And sometimes she brandished that card even in a playful way, well aware of the historical and threatening relationship that police have cultivated with people like me. This kind of white women know that the police primarily targets non-white people and the poor. So they know what they are doing when they transform their skin color and their fragility into a weapon. That is a conscious act. But the real problem is denial, as it maintains, whether intentionally or not, white power and privilege.
White power and privilege to the detriment of Blacks were constructed in the same way as the power and privilege of the White man over the White woman. The Christian culture which rendered women inferior thereby assigned the white woman to a subordinate position. In France, for example, this led to forgetting her in the Declaration of Human Rights of 1789, in which it was proudly implied that Man was exclusively White. During that time, the Negros were kept in slavery. Western countries were thus built on a sexist and racist basis, where they did not necessitate living in equality neither with women nor with non-white people, and the literature proves it.
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To remind Europeans of their cultural racism and to defend the colonized peoples, Aimé Césaire wrote this in his Discourse on Colonialism :”Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘niggers’ of Africa”.
And what exactly did Hitler want? He wanted the following, as quoted by Césaire in the same book: “We aspire not to equality but to domination. The country of a foreign race must become once again a country of serfs, of agricultural laborers, or industrial workers. It is not a question of eliminating the inequalities among men but of widening them and making them into a law.” This way of thinking began before Hitler, as evidenced in the public speeches of colonizers and in the writings of those that Europe considers as its greatest thinkers (Locke, Voltaire, Kant). And since the Black American is still seen as a foreigner in his own country, these sentiments remain in the United States.
And assassinations of Blacks are even more resounding in the United States simply because the culture of arms is stronger. The French police also kills, with the same methods, as the police of other Western countries but to a lesser degree. These are the same issues across countries when they are confronted with non-white people, with “the other”. And all of it is justified by a common history that they do not want to understand or admit to in seeking to repair what has been broken. Above all, they do not want to assume any responsibility for this past, which was far from glorious in human terms and which is the basis of the racism problem. But, as James Baldwin wrote in A Letter to My Nephew, “…it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime”.
Change remains a challenge of the modern era. So we have to face it altogether, Whites and non-Whites, the same way we face anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia or the same way we got mobilized to say “Je suis Charlie”. But White people are afraid. There is a lot at stake for them because it means that they will have to accept losing their privileges and sharing their power. And this is all the more difficult because they are, in recent human history, the human group which has lived the least in equality with “the other”. But the wave of revolt has risen. It is multiracial and we must all, Whites and non-Whites, determinedly grab ahold of it. This is how we prevent it from swallowing us up. And that is how it can allow human society to rise together and ultimately overcome and then the wave will withdraw peacefully, freed from its impetus and further damage.
The public lynching of George Floyd was certainly a catalyst. But we must add to this surge of energy and revolt the inability of capitalism to provide basic human needs: food, medical care, housing, quality education, a job that provides a decent wage. The protesters feel betrayed — they only aspire to peace and brotherhood, and they have understood that they do not share the same objectives as their governments and interest groups that govern them. They are denouncing the hypocrisy, the suffering and the misery to which they have long been subjected. This movement is looking for nothing but truth and justice. It urges us to build new attitudes, a new understanding and a new will. And therefore, it demands that we find courage in order to change this world.
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