Their answer might depress another teacher, but I was not surprised. Not one of my 12 students said they were aware that the officer alleged to have killed George Floyd was standing trial this week, nor did they know in which American city the trial would take place. I will not interpret their lack of knowledge as a lack of interest. Many of my students marched in the Black Lives Matter protests this past summer and so many have caretaking responsibilities that trump the headlines. Further, I’ve barely seen their faces this semester, as we are learning remotely and their cameras are usually off. They see my face through a narrow portal for 90 minutes each week.
We have also been given the chance to see George Floyd and former Minnesota officer Derek Chauvin through a similarly narrow portal, no doubt in the worst nine minutes of their lives. We have all been tuned to the same proverbial channel for a full pandemic year, with the steady stream of horrors and bad news bulletins underscoring our lives like a stock ticker.
Maybe we all just need to take a breath.
I will watch as much of the trial as I am able. As a citizen I am interested in the judicial process, but I am also keen to see how the defense elucidates the autopsy that found “no physical evidence of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation.” A juror must be interested in the particulars, such as this. I am not interested in the granular details. I am interested in this puzzle piece as part of the larger picture of how our country has systemically cut off the air supply to people of color and called it suicide. It does not always take the form of an aggressive knee on a neck, or a chain to an ankle, or a semi-automatic weapon to the head. Often the air supply is choked off more silently, more insidiously.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates called it “the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them.”
The passive power of whiteness has paved a path for me that is without much rubble. As I speak with my college students, most of whom are the first generation in their families to pursue higher learning, I want so much for my promises to them to not return void. I desire that they will graduate and go on to outearn me without much struggle. I hope one day to walk into their businesses and meet the kind of shock that sends me packing—only because I cannot afford their services on my teacher’s salary.
Yet the passive power of whiteness still looms large. A third of the country’s incarcerated population is Black. Housing discrimination that hearkens back to the Jim Crow era is still a reality for a great share of people of color. And the storehouses of white wealth persist all the while to grow. It is a tale of undeniable scourge and ignominy: affluence accumulated on the backs of enslaved people—which provided a stability and resiliency to white people—has created a racial wealth gap that is widening instead of narrowing.
A 2019 McKinsey & Company report showed working toward closing the racial wealth gap stands to add $1-1.5 trillion to the economy by 2028. An investment in equity portrays a future where everyone benefits.
I hope for a more integrated and economically equitable society and I believe great progress is possible even in the midst of a pandemic. I have faith in this possibility in spite of the hatred and violence the past decade netted us: record highs in violent hate crimes, negligent maltreatment of babies at our borders and mass incarceration. I remain hopeful that the disease of white supremacy, the blight of xenophobia and the plague of the racial wealth gap will become as outmoded and nonexistent as folks in the industrialized world dying of cholera.
In tandem with the beginning of Minnesota v. Derek Chauvin, the Christian tradition celebrates Holy Week. The eyes of Christians are cast upon the suffering of a homeless Jewish man two thousand years ago. Biblical accounts note Jesus Christ was handed over to the Roman soldiers for 30 silver pieces, an amount that was most likely 30 Roman denari; one denarius is reportedly the equivalent of $20. It is all too poignant to me that George Floyd was arrested for trying to cash a counterfeit $20, upon whose face the pro-slavery President Andrew Jackson’s face is etched.
Christ is reported to have expired around 3 p.m. on a Friday, after he was beaten and savagely whipped and forced to carry a heavy beam while in a state of shock. The actual crucifixion cuts off oxygen flow to the body’s organs, but, again, I am not as interested in the particulars. I am interested in the thread of the larger tapestry that shows the body of a brown-skinned man, who appears to be self-asphyxiating. Believers and unbelievers alike can agree Jesus did not put himself on that cross. I hope a jury will not be similarly deceived to think George Floyd put himself under that knee.
Kendra Stanton Lee is an instructor of humanities at Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology. She is on Twitter @Kendraspondence.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
