In Equal Rights, his haunting salute to the Black struggle in the 1970s, Jamaican Conscious Reggae singer the late Peter Tosh says it like no-one else: “Everyone is talking about crime…Tell me who are the criminals…

HARD TRUTHS  

Remembering George Floyd:

Who are the Criminals?

“Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. So God said to Noah, ‘I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them."  Gen. 6: 11-13, KJV)

In Equal Rights, his haunting salute to the Black struggle in the 1970s, Jamaican Conscious Reggae singer the late Peter Tosh says it like no-one else: “Everyone is talking about crime…Tell me who are the criminals… Everyone is heading for the top. But tell me, how far is it from the bottom?”

Like Black people everywhere, many of my White friends have reached out to us for help in making sense of the pent up anger that has exploded into the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. In response to these requests we are sometimes tempted to channel award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge in her book, ‘…Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race’. Why should the burden of explanation be ours when we did not create the problem?

Then there are days we will choose to speak. But even when we do, we will not offer some quick and dirty sketch of the systems that, like creeping vines, have kept their stranglehold on the necks of Black people for 400 years. For example, we will not use as reference point the so-called the two justice systems —one for the ‘rich and connected’ and one for ‘everyone else’--in our countries: we will add a third…the one for Black people.

That system begins with the kindergarten to prison pipeline our children experience every day in school--the low expectations; the projections of criminality by teachers; the absence of seeing themselves in positive images; the absence from STEM and proliferation on basketball teams; the speed with which police are called to lead them away in shackles (particularly in the U.S.) for small misdemeanors. Better yet, we will leave it to Michelle Alexander's groundbreaking The New Jim Crow, or Ava DuVernay in her wrenching documentary 13^th, to dissect and disassemble these soul-destroying day to day realities.

We may share lived experiences, like my friend, mother of a young Black man did. And when we do we will hope the response isn’t “Yah, I know, but…” As my friend puts it:

“My man child was and is subjectively cute to me, but unfortunately, [the local Police Service] saw him as a threat when they pulled a gun at him while he was waiting for a bus. [They]…used the line ‘Hey buddy, you look like someone we are looking for’. This is a common refrain heard by [Black people]…

“Or the fact that he has been profiled because of the skin he is in.  On one occasion, I was close by and sped to find him with Toronto’s finest because he was ‘riding (his bike) while black’.  I challenged the officer who said that he had been ‘following him for some time’, and pulled him over because he went through a red light.  He got a piece of paper that says that he was not charged but warned.  Translation, his name is in a database that can be pulled up by any police officer.  The stories/incidents are many, but FYI, my son has never broken the law.”

The funny thing about the way violence and criminality are defined in a racist society, is that a slap on the wrist for a White man is a murder sentence for a Black man. So when people like Bob Kroll, head of Minneapolis’s police union, remind us that George Floyd had a criminal record, they are banking on reasonable people saying, “Oh well then.” Then Derek Chauvin had the right to asphyxiate him to death. Hey, that’s what we do to everyone with a criminal record.

Mr. Kroll will not take us back to the root of a society that from the day George Floyd was born marked him—and others who share his skin color—for death by The System. He won’t remind ‘good’ people of what their decision wrought, when they voted for politicians whose answer to crime was to suck money from community development and to build bigger jails. He certainly won’t tell these 'good' people what happens when we incentivize policing injustice by privatizing prisons.

In Mr. Kroll’s view, the “terrorist movement …currently occurring, was a long-time build up which dates back years.” The terrorists? "Community activists with an anti-police agenda”. Their ‘crime’?: rejecting police brutality and asserting that Black Lives Matter. The answer to these "terrorists", he proposes, is more police.

Right. More police to beef up the system which bred the heartlessness that watched a 46-year-old man in his death throes calling for his dead Mama, as one of its own casually suffocated him in broad daylight. The system that cries foul when called into accountability; that flips the script to claim those who seek such accountability are promoting anarchy and the end of policing.

Mr. Kroll knows the key to ‘good people’s’ hearts: point to the ‘bad guys’.

But Mr. Kroll and others who think like him would do well taking a second look at the account in Genesis, where the violence that covered the land made God retch...the violence that ended the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Michael Brown, Philandro Castille, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo and countless other Black people either at the hands of police, or of the Court system that frees their killers.

To channel Peter Tosh, who are the (real) criminals? How far is it from the casual slaughter of Black Life (the bottom) to the systems at the top that turn a blind eye. 

Tell me, who, really, are the criminals?

In Solidarity.