I’ve been staggered by the video footage of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
Yes, I said murder. From what I can see, it shouldn’t be called a “killing,” as it’s being called by national media. I killed a bee that stung me a couple of evenings ago. I routinely kill plants that I forget to water.
Floyd was murdered when a police officer, someone who had been charged with protecting citizens like Floyd, held his knee to Floyd’s neck for at least seven minutes.
The officers involved have been fired, and Minneapolis’ mayor is calling for formal charges to be filed. I’m all for that. I don’t know how many more George Floyds I can take. Or how many more this country, or this world, can take.
But as heinous as Floyd’s murder was, and as pained as I and every other man who looks like Floyd is today, I cannot understand the looting and destroying of a Target and numerous other businesses in Minneapolis — including a public housing community — after peaceful community protests turned into less than peaceful, destructive riots.
This country has a centuries-long history of unlawfully killing black men. My father fled the Jim Crow south under the shadow of black bodies swinging from trees, so I grew up hearing the stories. My dad had a childhood friend who didn’t come home one night. That friend was never seen again. He was lynched in rural Mississippi in the late 1940s.
George Floyd was lynched in Minneapolis in 2020. In broad daylight.
I grew up in metro Detroit, hearing that I was to be home by the time the streetlight across from our house came home, and I was to avoid the neighboring suburb of Dearborn, which was run at the time by an avowed segregationist.
I learned as a boy what to say and what not to say to the handful of police officers who would pull me over, over the course of my life. I’ve been George Floyd.
I’ve not had the life choked out of me by any of those officers, and neither has any of my immediately family, so my heart goes out to Floyd’s kin. We need justice.
And I’m livid, like my brothers and sisters in Minneapolis, in LA, in Sacramento, or in any of the other American cities across the country where tempers are running as hot as the late spring heatwave we’re weathering. I understand — and feel — the anger behind the protests.
I don’t understand looting a Target. But it’s not about Target. Wal Mart, K Mart (are they still around?), whatever. As shopping goes, I prefer Target.
But I always pay for the things that I take out of one of their stores.
Breaking into and looting a Target is NOT the way to honor George Floyd, or the way to garner support to seek justice for Floyd, whose family would be ashamed. And I am, too.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” If our community has ever been challenged, we’re being challenged now, by corrupt justice and law enforcement systems that target African American men and see us as threats.
Even when our hands are cuffed and behind our backs.
But the way to the promised land is not to use the tragedy of George Floyd’s murder as an excuse to steal electronics and groceries from a Target. George Floyd deserves better. And we can do better.
We have to.
Michael's Mind's Eye 