WYTS: Minnesota Vikings. Original post here.
"Woke 1" was the hot new phrase in the discourse when I first wrote this a few weeks ago. But since Democrats are still performatively turning rightwards, this argument has not gone away. We want to know what "Woke 1" was, how it went wrong, what we can do to
fix this time, what "Woke 2" will be. As far as I'm concerned, that means 2020 is now history. Past
tense. A historian's job is doing exactly this, trying to reckon with the past
and maybe illuminate our present. Hopefully one can do it with more nuance,
research, and good faith than hot takes from certain OP-ed writers or elected officials. What was
Woke 1? Why should Black Lives Matter? Why Defund the Police? This is the George Floyd Protests.
I will do my best here, I probably won't solve racism and the divisions of the Democratic Party in under 2,000 words though. This story is so big, and these wounds are still so fresh, and these were usually written in a day, not the years of research they would require to be done proper justice.
We can just start with the facts:
George Floyd was 46. His friends called him “Perry” or “Big Floyd” since he was a big fella. His sports scholarship had not panned out, leading to a difficult adulthood, and in the last year of his life he was unemployed or marginally employed. He grew up in the Houston projects, so was a tough man by necessity. After dropping out of college, he had a scattered record of arrests, did four years in prison. In 2014 he moved to the Minneapolis area and was in the process of turning his life around, with up and downs. He was a Christian youth councilor, who spoke of his struggles with addiction and criminal records. He still was having difficulty with employment and substance addictions, not made any better by the 2020 lockdowns which cost him his truck driver and bouncer jobs. George Floyd was loved by some, or simply an anonymous part of a "the System" of the criminal justice apparatus to others.
On May 25th, Floyd parked at an intersection now named after
him, which is ominous foreshadowing. He went into a store, and bought
cigarettes with a $20 bill that may have been counterfeit. The store owner
called the police. Floyd was clearly in distress and his behavior was erratic.
He could barely stand as the police detained him.
Nothing he did that evening or in his entire life could justify what happened next.
At 9:25 PM, George Floyd was pronounced dead. He had been
murdered by a co-worker, in fact. They both were bouncers at the same club in
2019. This was Minneapolis PD officer, Derek Chauvin. A lot of the footage of
this murder is available online, through store security video, passerby phones, and
body cam footage on the officers. I couldn't watch that footage then, I can't
watch it now. I did try. I could only listen to the man howl for a second
before I had to turn it off. Didn’t even make it to the infamous “I can’t
breathe” line. I’m not sure how anybody can watch this…
...Fuck me, man. If you think you know better than everybody else, I dare you to watch that footage and tell me the reaction was overblown, the protestors asked "the wrong way". It's impossibly upsetting... Just horrible...
What followed was thousands
of protests and riots and what some would call "riots" across cities
around the world - including as far away as Almaty, Kazakhstan. Any place that
felt oppressed by their governments, federal or local, felt a connection with
George Floyd and this random, meaningless killing.
I said back in the 1969 Vegas Riot, where we started, that
it was "a depressingly common story" of civil unrest in the modern
American city. There are hundreds of these riots in the past century, including
the Detroit Uprising. The police overreact to a small crime or a perceived
crime and this explodes the racial tensions they themselves have intensified for years. We just keep not solving this problem across decades, across
generations, and then we’re shocked when the same things happen.
Leading up to the Floyd murder was a decade of protests and
riots from similar police violence incidents, more than you could ever list. There's Trayvon Martin's murder in Florida in 2013, Michael Brown in Ferguson
in 2014 (Rams fans, sorry, you moved), Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015,
Philando Castile in Minneapolis in 2016, and even just a weeks earlier in March
2020, Breonna Taylor in Louisville. This was part of a trend of increasingly
visibility and un-ignorable evidence of police brutality since Rodney King's
beating had been caught on video in the 90s. (Now get hyped, Rams fans.) It
could have been George Floyd, it could have been anybody's killing that was going to
finally explode this. Four years of openly racist MAGA government and the panic around COVID did not help either, but this reckoning was coming regardless.
The whole reason we have this… unwatchably gruesome POV footage from the police officers involved with Floyd's killing was in
response to this spree of murders and demands for reform. Anybody telling you
that "defund the police" was some naive, ridiculous Twitterati position
that only appeared out of the hysteria from the lockdowns is choosing to
forget a lot. Kaepernick was kneeling in 2016, guys.
What also did not help matters was the fact that every one
of these high-profile killings came with no consequences. The legal system
offered vast leeway for the officers involved, or in one case, just a racist
civilian carrying a gun around his neighborhood. For decades the courts had
ruled that the police were increasingly sovereign and immune to all prosecution
within a degree of "reasonable doubt" that could only be comprehended by those with a law degree. The solution to the injustices that sparked the LA Riots in 1992 seemed to be just making things more obliviously unjust. Besides also the problem of heavy
organization of the police as a special interest, and an increasingly
conservative one. Blue Lives Matter flags and such. The naked
impunity and even open cheering for these modern-day lynchings had to be
answered eventually.
Back to Minneapolis itself, on May 26th, marches and
protests were organized in response to the murder of Floyd. People were
demanding that all four officers involved be charged with murder. They marched
to the 3rd precinct station and demanded change, now. At some point this
became more chaotic as people defaced the building, threw rocks, and destroyed
a squad car. At 8 PM, the police were firing rubber bullets and tear gas at the
protestors. Sixty years of innovation in anti-crowd tactics meant this would
never become as potent a rebellion as in Detroit '67. Whether that’s good or
bad is up to discussion.
Through much of the week that followed, the Twin Cities saw
peaceful protests during the day, then in the evening, anarchy of looting, burning. Even
the police station was torched. Most of the full riot-y riots ended by June. Protests
in various forms would continue for years in Minnesota. There were two deaths, hundreds of
arrests, and vast costs in terms of insurance claims.
At the newly-christened George Floyd Square, the protesters set a barricade and make-shift art installation that covered it completely. Regular car traffic would not return to what had been 38th Street and Chicago Avenue for months. The police largely were unwelcome in this spot, though would appear occasionally when it saw a few non-police-related murders. This was a tough neighborhood before George Floyd died here, and it is one now. These unrelated crimes helped the anti-protest media with their claims that BLM had gone too far, and we needed to return to normal. I guess they won.
Though I'd ask them to define "normal".
Meanwhile in terms of national/international protests,
there's too much to discuss and just too much scope to do this completely or even sloppily.
Through the month of June, there were 140 protests daily on average. Most
states ended up calling on their national guard at one point or another. And many
protests were not violent at all until police response came down to enforce
curfews on terrified marchers. I remember hearing the stories in real time of
protestors getting squeezed on all sides in Brooklyn by anti-riot police, where
there had been no riot. Most of that record is still online, if you want to
read the uncountably massive volume of data. A certain President Trump had a
deep fetish for organizing federal troops to massacre the protestors, per
several Twitter statements. Luckily, he always seemed to lose interest in the
idea within minutes – for now at least.
This became a major debate about how police departments were
interacting with their municipalities, or even looting their cities. Many pointed out that during the decades
of urban blight and decay, police budgets just kept getting bigger. Defund the
Police was literally that, a demand that tax money go somewhere other than to
the militarized gendarmes often beating protestors or attacking reporters – which happened a lot. (The media somehow forgot that part of Woke 1, the part
where for example, their colleague lost an eye to a rubber bullet.) Reforms move slowly
though, and even in heavily blue cities, the political response was ambivalent
and scattered.
Black Lives Matter and George Floyd's protests were the largest civil rights protests since the 1960s. I'm not sure how you
could ever total up all the effects and damage of such things. Wikipedia claims
19 dead by June 2020, and who knows how much it was by 2021. There was a major
political success in terms of electing Democrats to power in the White House
and Congress, a Blue Wave, which a moderate centrist would struggle to explain
if Woke 1 was such a miscalculation. Defund the Police was extremely popular in
terms of polling at the time.
Now it did end up too broad, too confused, and too
complicated an issue to easily change with a march. Changing a name on a
Confederate statue did not fix anything. BLM went from a mere municipal
reform to a full demand that the entire white supremacist underpinnings of
western capitalism be torn out at once, and that was too huge an ask, probably
unsolvable at its core. By 2021 and 2022, inertia won out.
Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder in April 2021. His
three fellow officers are in jail now for aiding and abetting second-degree
manslaughter. That they did not escape justice is maybe the great success of
the protests, since we did not get lasting change. The George Floyd Act, a vast police reform, passed in the House
in 2021 but the Senate never even considered it for a vote. The tea was ice
cold by then. President Biden did as much as could with executive orders which
are now all rescinded.
So this is all going to happen again. And in fact, is happening. You want to balance
things out in terms of scales, the political reaction to the reaction has been
greatly worse. Minneapolis ended up occupied this very year by completely unaccountable and anonymous
federal agents. All in a naked, reckless partisan attack on an area that didn’t want to
vote for tax cuts on the wealthy. This cold civil war of my lifetime is getting
hotter every year. If you're annoyed that you have to have HR meetings of white privilege
at work, that's one thing, if you're voting for parties with fantasies of
genocides of millions of Americans, that's another. Who is going too far again? Who actually has an army you need to be afraid of?
The current
Democratic Party platform is that unaccountable police killing is pretty much okay if done quietly, and
without masks. A few deaths are acceptable
losses to keep the order. This is just part of it, a George Floyd now and then
again is good-enough or even preferable to radical alternatives. I sometimes
have very dark political thoughts, but I'm not sure I've had one that awful. "America only works if we kill a few non-white people in a careful media-managed way": that's the mainstream political opinion in the US right now.
Minneapolis will never forget George Floyd. George Floyd
Square is open to car traffic but it looks far from normal today. At the center
of the intersection is a rough, crooked garden with a Black Power iron fist in
the center, turning it into a roundabout. The ad hoc barricades and monuments
are being rebuilt now to look prettier and more orderly. In my opinion it would
be a better memorial to leave it messy and tossed-together, leave it the
battlefield that it was. But I know it will change. The project drawings are
promising bus service and bike lanes, so take what you can get.
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