The protests may be new but the history runs deep

The protests may be new but the history runs deep
The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last week has led to nationwide protests in the US, the likes of which have not been seen for decades…Meanwhile, the international attention being paid to the death of George Floyd and the subsequent action in the US has caused many in Australia to ask why we don’t pay this kind of attention to our own racial problems.
The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last week has led to nationwide protests in the US, the likes of which have not been seen for decades. The killing of Floyd seems particularly brutal, killed not by a gun, but by suffocation under the knee of a policeman while bystanders – and the victim – called for him to stop.
Floyd’s murder came soon after footage was released of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man going for a jog, hunted down and shot for no reason by white men who were not arrested for more than two months after the killing. The same day Floyd was killed, a video of a black man being threatened, again for no reason, by a white woman in Central Park in New York went viral. In March, Breonna Taylor, a Black woman in Kentucky, was shot by police after they entered her home unannounced.
DID THE REPORTING OF THESE EVENTS, ONE AFTER THE OTHER, LEAD TO THE WIDESPREAD PROTESTS, OR WERE THESE EVENTS REPORTED ON SO WIDELY BECAUSE SOMETHING WAS ALREADY BUBBLING?
Under Donald Trump’s presidency the USA has arguably become more divided than it had been for years. According to Dr Vanessa Barolsky, “The Trump administration has consciously fostered division and condoned racism, which has exacerbated pre-existing divisions and fault lines in society.”
“George Floyd’s killing was the proverbial ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’,” Dr Barlosky said, “His killing comes against a background of extraordinarily callous disregard of life by President Trump in his response to COVID-19, which has disproportionately affected the poor and marginalised in the US, along with a failure to provide any meaningful social safety net for people who have suddenly lost their economic livelihoods. It also comes against the background of hundreds of years of lynching of black citizens by white Americans and unabated killings of black citizens by law enforcement officers since 2015.”
The divisive Trump administration and the health and economic fallout of COVID-19 may have created an environment ripe for an uprising, Dr Barolsky believes. “The pandemic has been grossly mismanaged in the US, with Trump refusing to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem until the pandemic was already out of control and exacerbating this by making states in the US compete for life-saving resources such as ventilators. He slashed funding for the national Centres for Disease Control in the three years prior to the pandemic and has tried to roll back any reforms to the public health system introduced by Barack Obama. As a result, COVID has had a dire impact for those unable to afford expensive healthcare.”
Dr Josh Roose believes that COVID may be a small factor in the huge response to Floyd’s death “There is no question that COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted Black and Brown Americans and there will be significant grieving among many for lost elders.
“BUT ULTIMATELY IT IS THE POWER OF FOOTAGE THAT IS THE DRIVING FORCE. A WHITE POLICE OFFICER, HANDS IN POCKETS, KNEELING ON THE NECK OF A BLACK MAN FOR OVER 8 MINUTES, SNUFFING OUT HIS LIFE DESPITE PLEAS FROM THE MAN BENEATH HIM LOOKS LIKE, AND IS INTERPRETED BY BLACK AMERICANS AS, AN EXECUTION.”
As Dr Roose reminds us, the US has a long history of race riots and protests, “Riots are a key element of contemporary American history. There have been many, and a significant number of these are based on police brutality directed at black men; 1967 was referred to as the ‘Long Hot Summer’ and saw over 150 such riots. But they date back to at least the 19th century and very often back then it was whites lynching black men. More recently, Rodney King and the Black-Lives-Matter-related protests have come to the fore. The famous statement that ‘rioting is the language of the unheard’ has particular resonance. Or as one protestor on social media footage put it, ‘they don’t listen until you F*** with their money’.”
The historical racial discrimination and socioeconomic disparity in the USA, and the gross overrepresentation of Black people in the prison system and in deaths at the hands of police officers, “very much represent the intersection of race and masculinity”, according to Dr Roose, whose research in part focuses on masculinity. “Broader debates about black-on-black violence and police violence aside, at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement is a concern with a fundamental issue: White male police officers killing black men.”
“In historic terms, it was white men who kept black men in check, be it as slaves or as members of communities where police forces are primarily white. This broadly speaks to Connell’s conception of masculinity – hegemonic white masculinities – the dominant form against which other forms are compared and subordinated. From a historic perspective, it was very much ‘white men’ with their knees on the necks of black men. Thus [Floyd’s death] has a particular resonance and mobilising force.”
MEANWHILE, THE INTERNATIONAL ATTENTION BEING PAID TO THE DEATH OF GEORGE FLOYD AND THE SUBSEQUENT ACTION IN THE US HAS CAUSED MANY IN AUSTRALIA TO ASK WHY WE DON’T PAY THIS KIND OF ATTENTION TO OUR OWN RACIAL PROBLEMS.
Indigenous Australians, like Black Americans, are disproportionately incarcerated and since the 1987-1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody it is thought more than 400 Indigenous Australians have died in custody.
In the wake of George Floyd’s death, more attention has been paid to the death of David Dungay, a 26-year-old Indigenous man, who, like Floyd, pleaded with officers, telling them repeatedly he couldn’t breathe as they restrained him in a prison hospital in Sydney. After Dungay’s death there was a protest of around 50 people. In the US, hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the street across the nation, and more protests have occurred or are planned across the globe.
One reason that Indigenous deaths in custody may not draw as much domestic or international attention is that only 3% of Australia’s population identify as Indigenous, whereas 13% of America’s much larger population are Black. Another reason is that the killing of Black Americans often happens in the street, in Australia they often occur behind closed doors and in smaller communities rather than the big cities.
According to Professor Yin Paradies, however, there is a much deeper problem in Australia. “Black people are a distinct minority group in America that, unlike Indigenous peoples, don’t create the same anxieties in settler-colonial nations about the egregious harms to First Peoples that are foundational to the nation.”
Looking too deeply at the harms being caused to Indigenous people raises too many questions about the foundations of Australia and according to Professor Paradies, for substantial attention to be paid to Indigenous deaths in custody, Australia would have to be “a radically different country to the colonial one that we live in.”
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