The image of George Floyd gasping for breath is devastatingly
brutal; it is frightening in its casual and public execution. Where do we start
in articulating the number of repulsive elements to this murder? First, that a white
police officer felt such a sense of impunity as to brazenly murder an already
restrained man of color in public. Equally disturbing is that three of the
officer’s colleagues participated. Floyd was dying slowly and at no point did
anyone intervene. The public has generally expressed outrage at the video and consider
the officer was in the wrong; they agree that racism is wrong and literally
killing people. However it is our understandings of racism, and how to confront
it, that causes a divergence in views. Some believe there are only a limited
number of really hardcore racists, and that while we should weed them out,
#notallwhitepeople are bad. This view holds that racism is limited to a number
of abhorrent, overt, occasional acts perpetrated by a few ‘bad apples’. This
way of thinking absolves most white people from the uncomfortable truths of
racism. It is also extraordinarily self-serving for white people to believe
that Floyd’s murder – and the murders of millions of other people of color –
can be consigned to the actions of a few ‘bad apples’.
Racism discriminates against particular skin color and
identities; it rewards some and punishes others. It is present in things we say
and think; in systems of government; in community organisations. Racism is a system
that operates in small and large ways across all facets of society. The small
ways count just as much as the big ways, because the small ways are often
invisible; cumulative; pervasive; and inflict death by a thousand cuts. It is
experienced by people of color in their interactions with health systems,
schools, social welfare, and democracy. It is expressed in comments of hate,
behaviours of avoidance and exclusion, and through placing cumulative and
irrational barriers in front of people of color. Racism is a form of systemic
gaslighting that causes those who are its targets to believe that somehow they
need to try harder, be less problematic; that they should reduce themselves and
not make a ‘fuss’.
Racism is not some intangible experience that cannot be
pinned down. It is lived and it is real. In the US, currently more than100,000
people have died from Covid-19, a disproportionate number of whom are African
American, LatinX and other people of color. These are people whose suffocation
from Covid-19 has been enabled by the broader system of suffocation in which
they live; people whose health indicators and access to health care are worse
than for the general population. People who work disproportionately in service
industries and who are at the front lines of exposure, with less opportunity to
self-protect. People who are more likely to be incarcerated, unemployed, undereducated,
and homeless as a consequence of systemic racism. While George Floyd was
suffocated to death in a matter of minutes by a representative of law
‘enforcement’, tens of thousands of people of color are literally suffocating
from the arm of racism that exposes them to poverty, ill health, and now –
under a President who does not consider Covid-19 to be a national emergency –
death by pandemic.
It is interesting to observe some Australians looking across
the Pacific, and opining that our race politics is not like ‘theirs’. However
the color blindness of white privilege is not limited to the US. Australia has
failed to act on almost all of the 330 odd recommendations from two commissions
into Aboriginal deaths in custody (1987 and 1991). According to the Guardian
Australia, nearly 40% of deaths in custody between August 2018 and 2019 arose from
a lack of medical care being provided. David Dungay’s death – and his words, ‘I
can’t breathe’ – are a chilling reminder that our own race politics bear a harrowing
resemblance in some ways to those of the US.
There are still very strong taboos against calling out
racism in white Australia. The booing tirade against Adam Goodes is an
excellent case in point. In speaking about ‘The Final Quarter’, a documentary
about Goodes’ treatment as a footballer, commentator Waleed Aly noted,
‘Australia is very generally a tolerant society, until its minorities
demonstrate that they don’t know their place. And the moment someone acts as
though they’re not a mere supplicant, then we lose our minds’. As Goodes
matured in his football career, he embarked on a journey to discover more about
his Aboriginal history, his sense of identity, and the operations of racism in
Australia. His sin was to call out the racist comments of a young white girl
attending the football, despite explaining that it wasn’t her fault and that her
license to speak such words had been shaped by institutions around her. However
large segments of the football attending public would only tolerate a version
of Goodes that kept his place, kept his identity separate from his world of
work, and who didn’t commit the ultimate sin in Australia; of ‘politicising’
football by bringing identity politics onto the field.
Floyd’s murder is utterly confronting, however bringing to
justice the ‘bad apple’ police is only one aspect of the solution. What kind of
police force enables and empowers four men to perpetrate this act? It’s the
same kind of attitude that enabled New Yorker Amy Cooper to call the police on
an unarmed and unthreatening black man in Central Park, believing she could act
with impunity. It is the same kind of culture where more than 400 Aboriginal
deaths in custody since 1991 have resulted in zero charges ever being laid
against police officers in Australia. For people of color and indigenous
peoples, racism is constant, ever present, around every corner. And while it
may be predictable in its presence, the random nature with which it asserts and
inserts itself in everyday lives, as it did to George Floyd, wreaks a perpetual
state of trauma, havoc, and self preservation. As white people, we have an
obligation to think critically, to examine our actions (and inactions) in an
ongoing way, and to check our privilege; it’s a poison tree that grows bad apples, and we are responsible for the rot at its foundations.
