George Floyd died gasping for air, pleading for his life and his mother. He was unarmed, handcuffed, face down on the pavement. A police officer knelt on his neck until he stopped breathing. He was 46. My age exactly. He had a kind face.
This black man died at the hands of a white man over an alleged counterfeit $20 bill. He didn’t just die. He was murdered. And the policeman must have thought that his skin colour somehow permitted extreme violence. Had his last few moments not been captured on video, the world would never have known.
When I saw the footage, I thought to myself: racism isn’t getting worse, it’s just getting filmed. And yet, despite the black on white evidence (literally), there were those playing it down, in denial of the police brutality suffered by people of BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) origin. So where did this happen? And why were charges brought several days after the murder had been captured on camera?
I have – or certainly had – a deep and enduring fondness for the US. I lived there once on a student exchange programme and visited off and on for many years after. It was a life-changing experience, and arguably the best time of my life. Suddenly I was rooming with a black girl from Ghana and had fallen in love with a Palestinian Jordanian. How was that for pushing boundaries? Back home of course my Middle Eastern romance was the subject of uncomfortable silences and a perceived need to characterise my partner as ‘very nice and westernised’. It still grates on me, this need to tread softly around other people’s prejudices and bigotry.
One romanticised the US of course. This made it difficult to conceptualise its dark history of racial injustice and the psychosocial effects of slavery. Yet in 1995 the US embodied freedom, opportunity and ease – an effortlessness perfectly expressed by that handsome and preppy WASP, Hubbell Gardner, in the movie The Way We Were (a part played just as effortlessly by Robert Redford). “He was like the country he lived in, everything came easily to him.”
What I perhaps failed to appreciate was that the things which made living stateside look so easy – the clean streets, the late-night shopping – depended largely on BAME people working long late shifts. It is still a sad fact, even after 150 years of emancipation that racial inequality exists in wealth, education and employment. A black family, typically, enjoys one-tenth of the affluence of a white middle-class family. They are also unlikely to own their own homes, not being deemed sufficiently creditworthy. Being white is a worldwide privilege, even in the original legal sense. BAME people are treated less fairly by both the police and the courts. Yet racism goes beyond this, beyond random ‘stop and search’ (easily 50 occasions in your lifetime if you’re black), and beyond the fear that you will never be ‘believed’. The risk of imprisonment or deportation is very real. The interminable queues we see outside Identity Malta are, arguably, evidence of a form of institutional racism: the ‘hostile environment’ created by unwelcoming and criminalising immigration systems the world over.
We are still living far too comfortably (and inconsistently) with our consciences
I recently watched the BBC drama Sitting in Limbo, the true story of Anthony Bryan, one of many victims of the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ who faced deportation. He belonged to the ‘Windrush generation’ – the generic name derived from the first ship (one of many) to carry Afro-Caribbean migrants to Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s. These people were recruited by a country desperate for able and willing labour, and they lived and worked in the UK legally for decades, until finally they were dismissed, cut off from health benefits and pensions, and denied basic legal rights. They also lost their homes and were herded into detention centres.
Stories like these are founded on cold fact. Yet normally we experience such narratives at a ‘safe’ distance in films like To Kill a Mocking Bird, The Help, Just Mercy and The Green Mile. Meanwhile, we remain short-sighted or tone deaf in our daily lives. Many of those outraged by the video of Floyd were those nonplussed when a group of African migrants were detained at sea and refused entry to Malta for weeks on end.
OK, this might not be a fair connection, but I still see a massive ‘disconnect’ in the way many people think and feel. We clap for carers and frontliners, many of whom are migrants, and yet are terribly dismissive of these selfsame people. We usually justify ourselves by saying that Malta is ‘too small’.
Seeing Floyd die was a watershed moment for the entire world. It didn’t just lay bare the systemic failures in policing: it exposed the whole system. Whenever I read local stories about homeless migrants charged with petty theft or fraud, I make sure I read the online judgements. More often than not, they receive immediate effective prison sentences. Which saddens me.
I’m not for one moment condoning criminality here; but, being a lawyer, I can read the signs pretty clearly – that pleading guilty, as a rule, is when you don’t have, or cannot afford, proper legal representation.
Conversely, we have murderers, money launderers, drunken drivers and criminally negligent construction companies all pleading not guilty, landing bail and taking their cases all the way to the appeals court (where they are often successful).
Migrants, on the other hand, found guilty of rioting inside a detention centre or of stealing a gas cylinder can serve five years in jail.
Such terms may well be within the parameters of the law, but the uncomfortable truth is that that justice invariably rewards those who can afford it, or can afford to delay it.
So let this dark moment in America’s history be a lesson to us all. We are still living far too comfortably (and inconsistently) with our consciences. Our world, rightly, is being shaken up: Floyd, tragically, is now at rest.