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As the
prosecution prepares to wrap up its arguments, there have been some
deeply ominous and disturbing warning signs as the George Floyd trial
progresses. On March 20th, a Black student at Duke University came
upon George Floyd’s toxicology report on a Black History Month
bulletin board. Interestingly, there was no negative information
about Chauvin on the board: there was no lengthy record of the
numerous misconduct complaints against him or any information about
his eventual termination. Rather, the board was populated with
unflattering news about Floyd. It was ugly. The situation resembled
the unsettling USA/Ipsos
poll
published on the eve of the start of the Chauvin trial.
The
poll found an alarming reversal in the mainstream public’s
(White Americans) attitudes and sentiments towards Chauvin’s
behavior and Black Lives Matter (BLM): they have started regarding
BLM more negatively and Chauvin more positively. Even though no new
information has come to light about the circumstances of Floyd’s
slaying in almost a year, many people have changed their minds about
Chauvin and Floyd. It is the classic example of yesterday’s
victim eventually becoming today’s suspect. Suddenly, George
Floyd, not Derek Chauvin, is the person on trial.
To be honest,
many people of color, Black people, are hardly surprised by the
sudden change of events. George Floyd had a prison record. The
toxicology report revealed that there were drugs in his system at the
time of his death. Derek Chauvin’s defense attorneys made it
clear that this was the sordid legal path they would take in their
defense. They would attempt to convince the jury and witnesses (and
the millions of viewers watching the trial at home) that it was not
Chauvin who snuffed the life out of George Floyd by sadistically and
menacingly pressing his knee on the back of the handcuffed suspect,
but rather, it was the drugs that caused Mr. Floyd’s death.
By
most rational-minded people, this defense would be decried, derided,
and denounced as downright disingenuous nonsense. However, the
indisputable truth is that when it comes to race, rational behavior
is routinely cast aside in favor of the irrational. Derek Chauvin is
a middle-aged White male police officer. George Floyd was a Black man
with a criminal record.
The
passive-aggressive attack on Floyd served two purposes. One was to
show that he was far from being the innocent victim that large
segments of the mainstream media have touted him to be. The other,
more sinister purpose was to exonerate Chauvin from the murder by
presenting an acceptable argument as to why he did what he did. By
attempting to generate enough skepticism and doubt in the minds of
the jurors and spectators about the circumstances of Floyd’s
slaying, they hoped to ensure that many citizens would see that
Chauvin’s violent behavior was not as despicable as the video
seen around the world made it seem. On the contrary, Mr. Chauvin was
“just doing his job.” Please!
The
character assassination of George Floyd as a wayward criminal is
hardly surprising. Indeed, it is representative of a long list of
historical stereotypes and negative typecasting that much of the
public (including some Black people) harbor about Black men.
Being
a postmodern civil rights child who came of age in the early 1980s, I
cannot remember the overt, sordid, racially inflected practice of
lynching, Jim Crow (though it seems that the current GOP is trying
hard to return to such an era), and other forms of humiliation,
denigration, degradation, and dehumanization that were inflicted upon
a large segment of the Black population. However, I am astute to the
fact that Black men bore the brunt of these inhumane atrocities.
Their possible innocence was never considered. They were convicted by
a dehumanizing legal system and in the mind of a largely racially
bigoted populace.
Moreover,
I am old enough to remember some more recent cases where Black men
were falsely targeted as criminals. The 1989 Boston, Massachusetts
case of Charles Stuart comes to mind immediately. Stuart was a
29-year-old married man who killed his pregnant wife, shot himself in
the abdomen, frantically dialed 911, and gave police a description of
the supposedly “raspy-voiced” Black man who had committed
the horrific crime. Remembering this case also conjures up memories
of a South Carolina woman, Susan Smith, who, in November 1994,
brutally drowned her two children at the bottom of a lake in Union,
South Carolina.
Almost
immediately afterward, she had the perverse audacity to go on
national television, tearfully describing to a horrified nation that
a twenty-something Black man with a ski mask drove off with her
three-year-old and 16-months-old boys. When the racially charged
smoke cleared, the public was alerted to the fact that both Stuart
and Smith were the sadistic, deviant culprits of their own horrendous
crimes. Stuart committed suicide by jumping to his death in Boston
harbor. The fabricated image of the evil, rapacious Black men was
just that: fabrication.
 While
the truth prevailed in both cases, the larger issue that emerged was
the alarming vulnerability of Black men to such sinister allegations.
Had law enforcement officials in each of these cases not been so
effective in quickly zeroing in on the inconsistencies of Smith’s
story and had Stuart’s brother, Matthew Stuart, not gathered
the moral decency to inform the Boston police about the truth, two
innocent Black men could have been arrested, tried, and unfairly
convicted. It would have been reminiscent of the justice served in
Harper Lee’s, To
Kill A Mockingbird.
Another
important factor to acknowledge is that this is not a situation
experienced solely by poor and lower-income Black men. Upscale Black
men can also fall prey to such situations. Countless Black attorneys,
professors, businessmen, and other professionals can recite stories
about being stopped, interrogated, and in some cases, booked and
imprisoned for being seen as suspects. Remember Harvard University’s
distinguished professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., being questioned and
eventually arrested in his own house in 2009?
I
can share with you stories even closer to home. My three brothers
(all professionals, one now deceased) have had to endure enraging and
humiliating situations where they have been stopped and questioned by
police because they were DWBM: driving while Black and male.
Most
of the time, the level of interrogation and the officers’
confrontational behavior have been minimal, yet personally
disturbing. It was needless stress rearing its pernicious head. Caron
Nazario
and Daunte
Wright
(God rest his soul) are the most recent examples of this disgraceful
and menacing tactic.
The
fact is that Chauvin’s defense team is all too aware of the
power of the myth of the Black man as a demonic menace and the
attitude of guilty until proven innocent, both of which are deeply
etched in the psychological fabric of the larger society. Thus, they
have decided to pursue such a sinister strategy and recast the
current narrative by casting Derek Chauvin as the victim and George
Floyd as the villain. A sad and outrageous fact to be sure.
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