I can not breath anymore
. These were, last Monday, the last words of George Floyd, killed in a violent police arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota. For almost nine minutes, 8’46 “to be precise, the police officer who immobilized him maintained the pressure, with his left knee, against the victim’s neck. I can not breath anymore
, repeated George Floyd several times. Please!
, Please!
. But in vain.
Within days, this new victim of police violence and racism became the symbol of the anger of the entire African American community. Like the young Michael Brown in 2014 in Ferguson, and so many others before them. We have been demonstrating for a few days all over the United States, sometimes in a very violent manner. In New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Philadelphia etc. To the point that many governors or mayors have resorted to curfew, in the face of the beginnings of riots and looting.
This explosion of violence comes from afar. The racial issue, which has haunted American history since the birth of the United States two and a half centuries ago, has never been resolved. It took Lincoln and a war to end slavery in the 19th century. A bitter struggle, with its procession of martyrs like Martin Luther King, so that civil rights were finally enshrined in the constitution and the abolished segregation.
Everyone in the African American community carries with it this long time in history, that painful shadow that fits so badly with the American dream. And inertia is of incredible strength and violence in our societies. To be African American is still, on average, to be poorer today. Above all, it means being overexposed to police violence. Each year, more than 25% of those killed by the police (more than a thousand a year) are black.
The Trump problem
The death of George Floyd is, of course, part of a very violent American society itself. The massive distribution of firearms, the relationship with public authority, the institutionalized distrust aggravate the racial danger. The fear is so internalized that all African American mothers tell their teenagers when they go out to be careful. Not to provoke. Not to carry a too large telephone in their sweat pocket, for fear that the first police officer come to take it for a weapon.
We therefore understand anger. On which blow extremists who are transforming fair demonstrations into confrontations. We understand it all the better since this reaction is also the fruit of more recent history. At no time since his arrival at the White House has Donald Trump attempted to unite the nation. On the contrary, he never ceases, on a daily basis, to violently violate against all the categories he considers hostile.
His obsession with Barack Obama, which he strives to destroy all heritage, has only its indulgence, even its encouragement, for the apostles of the supremacist theses. In other words, those who are nostalgic for the time when racism was institutionalized. In the midst of an economic crisis (Floyd had just lost his job) and a few months before the presidential election, the hatred which the identity discourse of the American ultra-right carries within him returns to him in boomerang. Trump’s America is divided, violent. An America on fire. She deserves a real president, up to these old contradictions and her real dreams.
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