CIW: “Like Derek Chauvin and so many other officers like him, the coronavirus requires a favorable environment to kill its victims. And in both cases it is the very same environment that facilitates the killing— one defined by structural inequalities created and protected by institutional racism.”
“I can’t breathe
please sir
please
please
please I can’t breathe”
Those were the final words of George Floyd, murdered by the police in Minneapolis, MN, on May 25th.
The details of his final moments are well-documented. But the details of George Floyd’s death, as horrifying and infuriating as they were, are not the thing that have stopped this country in its tracks and moved hundreds of thousands of people to flood the streets — of big cities and small towns alike — in protest.
In all fifty states. In the face of widespread police brutality. And in the midst of a deadly pandemic.
Instead, it is the very fact that George Floyd’s death was not a singular event, but rather just the latest in a heart-wrenching litany of essentially identical murders — identical in terms of killer, victim, and circumstances — that has made this moment a national tipping point. To borrow the Spanish phrase, George Floyd’s death was the “la última gota que derramó el vaso,” the last drop that overflowed the glass.
The names of those murdered by the police before George Floyd are etched into our consciousness: Jamar Clarke and Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, Stephon Clark and Tony McDade, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and Eric Garner… the list goes on, and on. Indeed, the circumstances of their deaths are so similar that we have heard George Floyd’s last words before, his unheeded appeal sounding a haunting echo of Eric Garner’s final plea for his life less than three years earlier: “I can’t breathe.”
This is America…
There is one detail of George Floyd’s death, however, that, for anyone who has watched the video documenting the last, horrific moments of his life, is impossible to forget: the cold, heartless look in the eyes of his killer, Derek Chauvin. For nearly nine minutes, Chauvin’s expression remained unchanged while he slowly drained the life out of another human being. As he listened to the man under his knee plead for his life, call out to his mother, and by degrees descend into unconsciousness and ultimately death, Chauvin — in broad daylight, on a crowded city street — never even blinked. Even after paramedics arrived and started taking his pulse, Chauvin kept his knee pressing down on Floyd’s neck; though Floyd had been unconscious and unmoving for several minutes, Chauvin wouldn’t release pressure until the paramedics ordered him to stop, nearly a minute later.
His was the face of a sociopath. And in his face, if you look closely enough, you can see us. You can see America...
