Racism Here and Now in America: A Tale of Two Videos
In Minneapolis, George Floyd died as a policeman kneeled on his neck for five minutes, even after cuffing him.
In New York, Amy Cooper called 911 because an “African American” man told her to put her dog on its leash.
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Bypassers shot video of George Floyd’s arrest and execution on Monday evening.
The backstory is that police confronted the dead man in response to a complaint about a forged check. The cops say the suspect resisted arrest. Floyd was not available for comment.
From the Guardian:
In the video footage, witnesses can be heard shouting at officers to get off Floyd’s neck. One yells, “Bro, he’s not even fucking moving!” Another asks if “you’re going to just sit there with your knee on his neck”.
Another witness says: “Did you kill him”?
In a Facebook video, witness Darnella Frazier said she stopped to record the incident as she was on her way to meet friends. Officers had already pinned Floyd to the ground, she said, when one began kneeling on him.
“They was pinning him down by his neck and he was crying. They wasn’t trying to take him serious,” she said. “The police killed him, bro, right in front of everybody.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents the congressional district Floyd’s death happened in, said: “It is sickening to watch this black man be killed while helplessly begging for help. Black lives matter isn’t just a chant, it’s a call for justice. It’s a call for our humanity to be recognized. This must stop. There needs to be an immediate Department of Justice investigation into this.”
From the Washington Post:
Now, the FBI and state authorities are investigating his death as advocates and city officials call for a quick response.
“Being black in America should not be a death sentence,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) said during a news conference Tuesday. “For five minutes, we watched as a white officer pressed his knee to the neck of a black man. For five minutes. When you hear someone calling for help, you are supposed to help. This officer failed in the most basic human sense.”
https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1265408948733120513?s=20
On Tuesday afternoon, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said that the officers “involved in the death of George Floyd have been terminated,” adding that, “This is the right call.”
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1265265746432622595?s=20
The Minneapolis killing comes on the heels of several cases of Black men and women being killed by police or former law enforcement across the US.
From Al Jazeera
The FBI is investigating the police shooting death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. Taylor, a Louisville emergency medical technician, was killed by police in the early hours of March 13 as she laid in her bed. Police said they were serving a warrant as part of a drug investigation when they returned fire from the apartment. Taylor's boyfriend said he was firing in self-defence, believing his home was being broken into. No drugs were found in the apartment. One officer was injured.
The US Department of Justice is weighing possible hate crime charges in the US state of Georgia over the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed Black man, and the police handling of the case.
Arbery was killed in February as he ran through a predominantly white neighbourhood in Glynn County, Georgia. The arrests of Gregory McMichael, a retired investigator for the local prosecutor's office, and his son, both of whom are white, came more than two months after the incident and only after a video of the shooting went viral, raising questions about the handling of the case. Police have also since arrested the man who filmed the incident.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is also investigating the shooting death of Yassin Mohamed, a Sudanese American man, who was killed by police on May 9 after having "several altercations" with law enforcement in the 24 hours before his death. Police say they fired on Mohamed after he charged officers with a large rock. The Council on American-Islamic Relations in Georgia has condemned the incident and called for answers, including whether Mohamed was suffering from mental health issues.
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Bird Watching while Black...Christian Cooper, 57, walked to Central Park on Monday to engage to visit the Ramble, a area full of winding paths and thick greenery that attracts over 230 bird species.
He’s a nerdy guy who happens to be on the board of the New York Audubon Society. In real life he’s an editor for Health Science Communications, although comics fans might remember him as an editor for Marvel who introduced the first gay character into the Star Trek comics.
Amy Cooper (no relation), who is now a former executive at Franklin Templeton Investments, was letting her dog run unleashed and was told to obey the posted rules about pets in that part of the park by Mr. Cooper. After some back and forth, he began recording a video that’s now gone viral.
He posted the recording on Facebook, using the name Karen ( a slang phrase used to characterize outrageous acts of privilege) as a descriptor.
Central Park this morning: This woman's dog is tearing through the plantings in the Ramble.
ME: Ma'am, dogs in the Ramble have to be on the leash at all times. The sign is right there.
HER: The dog runs are closed. He needs his exercise.
ME: All you have to do is take him to the other side of the drive, outside the Ramble, and you can let him run off leash all you want.
HER: It's too dangerous.
ME: Look, if you're going to do what you want, I'm going to do what I want, but you're not going to like it.
HER: What's that?
ME (to the dog): Come here, puppy!
HER: He won't come to you.
ME: We'll see about that...
I pull out the dog treats I carry for just for such intransigence. I didn't even get a chance to toss any treats to the pooch before Karen scrambled to grab the dog.
HER: DON'T YOU TOUCH MY DOG!!!!!
That's when I started video recording with my iPhone, and when her inner Karen fully emerged and took a dark turn...
From Fortune:
"I videotaped it because I thought it was important to document things," he told CNN. "Unfortunately we live in an era with things like Ahmaud Arbery, where Black men are seen as targets. This woman thought she could exploit that to her advantage, and I wasn't having it."
The summoning of the police to address the presence of a Black person, typically minding their own business, isn’t simply poor judgment or a temporary lapse in civility. It’s part of a broader tactic that white people have long used—often without thinking—to summon the state’s power on their behalf with the intent on restoring racial order.
https://twitter.com/melodyMcooper/status/1264965252866641920?s=20
It’s (not) funny how many will assume Amy Cooper is some sort of hard core racist Republican... Maybe even a MAGAt.
Nylah Burton at the Independent did some digging:
However, campaign contribution information — with donations to Democrats such as Barack Obama, Pete Buttigieg, and John Kerry — leaked online earlier today appeared to suggest that Amy actually identifies as a liberal. This matters, because in this political era, during this most critical US presidential election, it is necessary that we understand and recognize that white violence transcends party lines and political ideology...
...Assuming that Amy Cooper is a white conservative Trump supporter desensitizes us to the ways in which even “progressive” white people protect their spaces from Black people. We cannot assume that a liberal or even a progressive political future will save Black people from white fragility and white supremacy and white violence. A long legacy of considering themselves superior doesn’t go away just because someone has a “D” for Democrat behind their name, or on their voter registration.
As far as we know, Amy Cooper is the ideal liberal on paper. She also threatened to call the police and falsely report “an African American man” was “threatening her life” in a country well-known for allowing fatal police brutality against unarmed, innocent Black people.
But Amy Cooper is not an anomaly. She is, unfortunately, the norm.
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Ahem...
https://twitter.com/Impolitics/status/1265417456232706049?s=20
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