The Murder of George Floyd — Just Another Day in the Land of the Free

Whether is was the chilling lack of emotion on the face of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin as he slowly choked the life out of George Floyd on the ground, keeping his knee on his neck for nine long horrifying minutes despite him screaming that he couldn’t breath, and despite him pleading for his ‘Mama’. Or whether it was the insouciance implied in the ease with which he did so in front of witnesses in broad daylight.

Whatever it was, over the course of those nine fateful minutes Derek Chauvin was more representative of what America stands for than the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Statue of Liberty, or any of the other baubles deployed in service to the myth of the United States as the land of the free.

Chauvin, at that moment, was the most pristine vision possible to conjure of the white supremacy that defines America far more than democracy ever has. He was the overseer with his knee on the neck of a runaway slave, the slaveowner’s whip, the lynch mob’s noose, the prison guard’s boot. In other words, Chauvin symbolised in those nine minutes the entire legacy and long history of racial oppression in a country that was born in genocide and developed and nourished for two centuries on the back of the African slave trade.