FROM FRANCE- George Floyd died during his arrest on the street on May 26 in Minneapolis, USA; he died from asphyxiation because of the policeman kneeling on his neck, hands in his pockets, for almost 9 minutes, while George Floyd tried to scream « I can’t breathe, please ! ». He died on this street road, next to three other police officers who witnessed the scene and did nothing. The whole situation has been caught on camera, thanks to an eyewitness, who sent it on the social media. The footage went quickly viral, partly because of the policeman overly shocking posture - full body weight pushing through his knee on a bare neck, hands in his pockets, the suspect was clearly detained and he knew it; but mostly because like too many before him, George Floyd was an Afro-American man, while the homicidal policeman was white.
This rapidly set the city on literal fire and spread to numerous American cites as days and nights went by. The US President, unable to defuse the situation, added oil on the fire, as he dehumanized protesters and fled into the White House bunker. Then, numerous Europeans flocked onto the places to show their support and reassert that « Black Lives Matter »; solidarity later came from the Rojava in Kurdistan, Mexico, Australia, even Japan. All these demonstrations denouncing their own police brutality shown very large crowds, shouting together George Floyd’s very last words, « I can’t breathe! ».
When we think about this supplication, we instantly feel it in our flesh, in our lungs: the emotion we feel can literally take our breath away. Interestingly enough, this lack of oxygen resonates with the most dreadful symptom that the Covid-19 can bring in its severe form: respiratory difficulties, leading to the dropping of oxygen levels in the blood, it can only be relieved by a ventilator in a hospital. At that stage, many have died; the survivors’ doctors don’t know yet the extent and permanency of the damages they are going to face, and how long it is going to be hard to breathe.
On a less tragic level, we can safely say that the whole Covid-19 pandemic, its economic and social aftermath have left us very anxious. At first, we were afraid to die from an unknown virus, now we dread all the consequences of the necessary lockdowns. Naturally, everyone doesn’t dread the same things, as we face very different situations according to our financial stability.
For instance, white-collar people who could « smart work » from home discovered how happy they were to spend more time with their families; their working time stretched on very unusual hours, and some got monitored, but not all seem to mind this substantial transformation of the way they work.
On the other side of the socio-economic spectrum, a new term was forged, the « essential workers ». We (re)discovered that the very continuity of society and State lays on people who get up very early, drive hours, work hard jobs, and are outrageously underpaid. These hard-working people are the reason we could continue to buy basic goods, to be taken care of, to send messages to distant loved ones. Yet, in some « developed » countries, these essential workers showed up to work with very few protective gears at the beginning - we’ve all seen pictures of nurses with trash bags over gowns —, whereas they were the most exposed to the virus. Despite the overwhelming gratitude for all their efforts and sometimes life sacrifices, essential workers have still deemed an economically disposable force, a dehumanized « human capital » threatened by each economic recession, but also by the process of automation.
G. Floyd’s cry was only the tip of the iceberg; today, everyone realizes it’s a cry uttered by so many in front of police brutality; but not only. Indeed, police brutality is merely the physical, visible force that takes our breath away. But what about the essential and independent workers’ longing for a dignified future, currently fading away in economic, political, and ecological uncertainty? What about the parents’ fear of letting their children play outside in poor neighborhoods, exposed to society’s violence? What about protesters teargassed for stating a disagreement in the public space, without any political answer? What about all the government’s legislative inflation, continuously shrinking the unregulated, free spaces of our existences? What about all the people suffering from air pollution-induced asthma? Can all these people truly breathe?
It is as if George Floyd’s supplication for oxygen was echoing to an invisible, unspoken form of suffocation enhanced by our political, social, economical, ecological, and psychological order. As if his choked cry was revealing a framework of understandability stretching around the world. As if his cry and its reception were signaling a brittle world order, barely standing thanks to the law enforcement powers.
We are or feel out of breath, individually and collectively, because our political systems are out of breath. There actually is plenty of evidence in political science demonstrating the great fatigue of our parliamentary democracies: abstention, rising of far-right parties, judicialization of the relations between citizen and political leaders… The potent collective emotions brought together by George Floyd’s murder undoubtedly are an emergency signal.
Riots being the language of the unheard - as Martin Luther King said himself -, now is the time to address all the issues obscured for decades. This emergency is an opportunity for us and our leaders to think about the way we want to continue to live together; otherwise, this chiaroscuro we’re living in may bring forth monsters.
By Prune Zammarchi
Prune Zammarachi, aged 26, is a french student post-graduated in Contemporary Philosophy and Political Science. She seeks to develop her career in Geopolitics and International Relations. Throughout years of research, she specialized in Political Philosophy and Science, more precisely on logics of power. She worked at political and social institutions on the effects of the political speeches, on the grassroots of speeches, and on government policies.
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