Death of a Liberal and Black Lives Matter

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

BY TONY MCKENNA-DECEMBER 4, 2020

I am writing in the midst of strange and surreal times. From late 2020, and if any period of time has been in danger of confirming Lenin’s old maxim, ‘There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen’ – it is surely this one. At around Christmas last year a new strain of virus broke out, it seems, somewhere in Wuhan Province in China. As the New Year drew into focus, we began to hear rumblings – this was more serious than a run-of-the-mill flu, and furthermore, there wasn’t a known cure. Even at this point people like myself, who live in the UK, and other areas of Western Europe almost half-a-world away still felt – without consciously framing it – rather insulated from the whole phenomenon. This would be a passing phase; like the SARS outbreak almost two decades before, it would be something which lingered on the periphery of our consciousness and our lives before disappearing without a trace.

Of course, that is not what happened. Instead the virus spread like a medieval plague, wreaking havoc across the world, forcing nations to close their borders, economies to descale and whole populations to go into lockdown. In Italy, the death count grew so rapidly that the military was brought in to store the corpses in churches and warehouses. In Ecuador, the bodies of the victims grew so numerous that many were just abandoned on the side of dusty roads like so much rubbish. The images broadcast from the global media were at the same time heart-rending and apocalyptic. The designation ‘Covid-19’ which, only a few months ago, meant very little to very many, is now on the tip of everyone’s lips. It’s hard, clinical syllables speak of the cold and relentless march of infinitesimally small particles of virus and our vulnerability as a species to them – even in an epoch where we have split the atom and space travel has morphed from science fiction into accomplished fact.

But the virus laid bare more than just the fallibilities which inhere in our biology. It also laid bare the fallibilities in our forms of social organisation. While the rich were able to socially isolate, to retreat to lonely country mansions or second homes in sea-side villages, the poor, as ever, had no way out. Locked into tenement housing, often many people to a floor, even to a room – pressed into tight urban spaces with squat accommodation, and no feasible form of ‘socially distancing’ – the illness cut a swathe through their numbers, in the most painful and ruthless of ways. Men and women who couldn’t distance themselves, who couldn’t work from home but couldn’t afford to take a break from their jobs in the wider world either, often brought death back with them, carrying it into their homes on their clothes, their hands, their breaths – an invisible time bomb which would blow families apart and finish off loved ones. Lives lost – and to the sickening pain of grief was added the sting of guilt, and of utter, utter helplessness which is so often the lot of poverty.

In a moving passage, apropos of the death of his own father, the great essayist and activist James Baldwin reflected on the act of having a funeral, what need such an event fulfils: ‘The real man, whoever he had been, had suffered and now he was dead; this was all that was sure and all that mattered now. Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came he, too, would be eulogized, which is to say forgiven, and that all of his lapses, greeds, errors and strayings from the truth would be invested with coherence and looked upon with charity. This was perhaps the last thing human beings could give each other’. Perhaps too, this was the last great cruelty that the Corona virus would inflict, that the loss of so many could no longer be marked by the type of funeral rites which had pervaded generations – rather, bodies left to pristine isolation, gradually mouldering in the confines of some darkened room.

Governments trotted out the same familiar lies that they do in times of war. We are all in it together, we were told. Where I live the TV channels became jammed up with the images of sleek, feted politicians making speeches in which – as though in the grip of some compulsive disorder – every other sentence automatically made reference to the ‘Great British Public’ or the ‘Great British NHS’ – the same public health service those politicians had spent over a decade defunding and privatising. We were greeted by the ghoulish spectacle of those politicians shuffling out of their Downing Street accommodations, the flash of the cameras recording the lifeless grins they had affixed to their faces like plague masks, while they clapped robotically for the NHS workers – the same workers whose pay rise they had voted down a couple of years before, baying gleefully as they did.

The death of NHS frontline staff spiked, not simply because they were exposed to more concentrated doses of the virus – but because the same government had, from the outset, failed to provide the money required for medical-grade masks and equipment which would have saved many of the lives medical staff were so bravely risking. While Boris Johnson clapped, Rome burned, and yet still elite politicians appeared like clockwork as if on cue; to tell us just how much they appreciated the sacrifices of the poorest – of those who had to continue to keep society ticking over, the shop workers, the delivery men and women, the cleaners, medical staff and carers. With a ‘spirit of unity and determination’ our Prime Minister urged – his rich, patrician tones faltering with the sheer emotion of his patriotism – ‘the United Kingdom will emerge stronger than ever before’. What meagre weight poverty and death carry before the vision of the eternal nation and the immortal colours of a flashing flag – as those same words are echoed down the generations, sinister and beguiling: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

To the maelstrom of the virus as it swept across the globe, there was added one other event. It happened an ocean away in a non-descript Minneapolis suburb. It was relatively ordinary in terms of its everyday horror. However it was captured on camera. After a report of a forged bill, police were called and an officer would, without provocation, draw his gun on one George Floyd – a middle-aged black man who was then arrested and ‘restrained’ on the floor. The police officer kneels on Mr Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, while the pinned man fights to breathe, croaking out the fear for his life, before finally – and in abject terror – he begins to beg for his mother. Eventually he becomes non-responsive. The cop does not remove his knee. The pinned man’s pulse is checked. Still the cop does not relent. George Floyd is declared dead at the hospital one hour later.

The whole time the cop who is doing this appears almost nonchalant, his eyebrow cocked – at one point he puts his hand into his pocket. He has the swagger of vicious arrogance, the complacency of a stupid, unfeeling bully whose miserable and sadistic life is shielded by petty officialdom and the generic authority of a uniform. Officer Derek Chauvin looks like someone who has learnt that he can use his fists with impunity; yes, that most of all – he looks like someone who knows he can get away with it. And to be frank, such an assumption on his part would be far from unsound. After all, in any other time, Mr Floyd’s murder might have passed relatively unnoticed, except from on the part of the loved ones and the community of the victim himself. A campaign group might have picked it up, added it to the roster of such occurrences. Perhaps a local reporter might have worked on the story, carrying it in a few columns before it eventually disappeared into the spume of generalised misery which enshrouds such events. After all, these things happen so frequently that they form a backdrop to life, especially to the lives of black Americans.

And yet. That is not what happened. This incident – this cavalier application of unbridled power by the brutal mechanics of the state machine – acted as a flashpoint, illuminating the chasm of oppression, racism and police violence which lay behind it; within hours, the video footage had gone viral, and the following day the first protests took place in Minneapolis where protestors clashed with police in the streets. The natural reaction of the authorities was to stamp down hard but this was the equivalent of pouring petrol on a fire and soon several police stations were themselves in flames. Going into June, five days after Mr Floyd’s death, protests had erupted in every state, and though 24 000 troops from the national guard were activated and curfews declared, along with law enforcement personnel from dozens of agencies – this too proved a futile endeavour; trying to subvert the building power and violence of this great and interminable movement of people from below stirred to its very depths – was like attempting to halt a tidal wave by way of stepping out in front of it and raising one defiant hand.

Even the thick fug of stupidity which insulates the mind of the current US president from the reality he presides over was penetrated by the potency and power of the social unrest; in the early stages of the protests he quipped – with the swaggering bravado of someone who has seen one too many John Wayne movies – ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts’, but a couple of weeks later, as the American landscape had been engulfed in protest and riots his tone was notably more rueful and conciliatory, when he described the murder of Mr Floyd as a ‘disgrace’ and even went as far as to suggest that certain chokeholds the police currently employed should be made illegal.

The dissonance between Mr Trump’s atavistic and monochrome politics and the sheer complexity and richness of the social change which was billowing closer and closer to the gates of the White House – was made apparent in terms of the rambling, confused nature of his speechifying. In one particularly incoherent and nonsensical delivery he merged the prosaic with the utterly bizarre, remarking on how employment rates had taken a turn for the better and how this, in turn, meant that the murdered George Floyd was now ‘looking down and saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country’. But if, as the days became weeks, the most powerful man in the world could only experience these mass protests as incoherent and befuddling – then those who had the least power, those at the bottom, intuited their rationality and their necessity within moments. For them, the protests were no mere aberration, and they were not to be reduced to criminality or looting either.

Rather they had emerged from an ongoing struggle, an ongoing history, which had ebbed and flowed over generations; the various strategies of criminalisation which have been pursued against black people in the US were the expressions of this. From the chain gangs which were introduced in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery in order to secure a different form of uncompensated labour, to the ‘war on drugs’^[1] which allowed for the type of mass incarceration and state-sanctioned murder that helped defuse and destroy the political organisations, like the Black Panthers, which had emerged out of the Civil Rights movements. All the way to the present day where mass incarceration has become fully fused with private enterprise and extra-legal lobbying groups to create a financial racket in which thousands of innocent people are arrested and languish in jail simply because they can’t afford bail money.

The criminalisation of black people, therefore, had been shaped as a clear strategy on the part of the state to target and cripple expressions of popular power, to coerce labour along explicitly racial and class lines, while facilitating the enrichment of an elite which – ever more parasitical – grew bloated and septic having gorged itself on such unremitting suffering. It is in this context that the horror of what had happened to George Floyd forms a link in a chain of systematic oppression and mass murder. And it was this which the Black Lives Matter campaign was able to bring to light with such pathos and such pain, articulating the experience of black people in America with a simple and deathly slogan – that ‘I can’t breathe’ – the unbearably poignant words uttered by George Floyd just before his death; but words which had been croaked out by other black men in the moment of their murder including Eric Garner, including Elijah McClain, including Javier Ambler, including Manuel Ellis, and others. That ‘I can’t breathe’ was no longer simply the words of an individual in his death agonies – they were the words of a whole people who had struggled and fought to break the chains of slavery, who had smashed the political and legal forms of apartheid through the most heroic acts of demonstration and revolt, and yet still they found themselves smothered by a miasma of racism and ignorance, still they found their lives to be disposable in the very place they had come to call home.

Those words resonated around the world. From ‘the Black Trans Lives Matter’ demonstrations which broke out in the heart of Brooklyn to the streets of Amsterdam where protestors chanted in their thousands, ‘I can’t breathe’. From the socialists in Sri Lanka who gathered in the capital’s Liberty Plaza waving placards which sported the words ‘Justice for Floyd’, to the moving mural of George Floyd which was daubed onto the bullet-scarred wall of separation which segregates poverty-stricken Palestinians from Israel proper. In France too, Palestinian flags flew at a Black Lives Matter protest in the Place de la Republique, Paris. That there are affinities between two states which have both evolved a top-heavy police apparatus adept at brutalising on a racist basis the peoples they have displaced and impoverished goes without saying. Indeed Israel’s police, military and intelligence services have provided training for American law enforcement in terms of use of force and crowd control. But the global explosion of Black Lives Matter revealed something else; it revealed the intimate and powerful connection which exists between peoples – worlds away – the struggles from below which recognise collective forms of oppression and whose solidarity crosses racial and geographical lines. The very essence of internationalism.

Even in my little neck of the woods, the protests breached all expectations. Thousands of people across the UK gathered to protest for BLM. For a long time, the liberal media had carried a rather self-satisfied tone of British exceptionalism; racism was, of course, a problem in other places such as the US, but the rather down-to-earth British sense of fair play and even-handedness prevented such concerns ever reaching a critical mass in this country. No Jim Crow here folks, and there never was. Keep stiffening that all important upper-lip and remember we are in it together donchyaknow?

As always, such comforting and cosmetic balms really only worked to disguise the darker, more lupine shapes of the reality behind the facade. Black people in my country are almost twice as likely to die in police custody. Police in England and Wales are three times more likely to arrest a black person rather than their white counterpart, and in the period 2018-19 official figures demonstrate that physical force on the part of the police was five times more likely to be applied to black people. Black people were nine times more likely to be stopped and searched. And, perhaps most startling of all, a recent report drew attention to the fact that ‘the proportion of black people in jail in the UK was almost seven times their share of the population, whereas in the US the proportion of black prisoners is four times greater than their population share.’ In the same month George Floyd was murdered by police, a recording went viral of the UK police tasering a black man (Desmond Ziggy Mombeyarara) in front of his five year old son. The reason for his stoppage? He had allegedly broken the speed limit. A witness at the scene described the officers’ behaviour as ‘aggressive and threatening’ and said they made no attempt ‘to deescalate the situation.’

But if the mainstream media wasn’t so keen to reveal the truth about the social realities of race and discrimination in the UK, there was a way in which these realities were revealed, if you like, at the level of the collective unconscious of the nation itself; there was a way in which the history of race and racial oppression was materialised at the level of town and city, as clear as day – and yet, from the hustle and bustle of our ordinary lives, the majority of us had never even stopped to take a proper look. I am, of course, talking about statues. In the UK alone there are scores – perhaps even hundreds – of statues in highly visible and public places which commemorate key figures of British imperialism such as Cecil Rhodes who believed the ‘white race’ was paramount and went on to prosecute this belief in and through his murderous colonial adventures in Africa against the indigenous peoples there. Or earlier figures like Sir Robert Clayton, who had managed to realise a tripartite level of charmingness in as much as he was simultaneously a banker, politician and slaver – someone who was on the board of the Royal African Company which shipped more African slaves into the Americas than any other institution.

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