It’s not nearly enough. Not for what he did. Not for what he refused to do. Not when he’ll probably be paroled in fifteen years, when he’s sixty and may well have another twenty or thirty years to live. Not when he had taken an oath to protect and serve the people of Minneapolis but deliberately, impassively, callously knelt on a man’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, summarily executing him over a suspected counterfeit twenty. It’s just not enough.
Last Monday morning, East 38th Street and South Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis were quiet. No protestors or chanting or confrontations between police and residents. The streets were open though only an occasional car maneuvered around the rough wooden sculpture of a brown upraised fist, between the concrete barriers, and under the steady gaze of George Floyd, whose larger-than-life images look out from two sides of Cup Foods and down from a billboard on the roof. Evidence of pain and outrage, sorrow and hope still fill the square though less viscerally, less raucously, and with less furor than last summer. As one hand-painted sign now says, “This is a sacred place.”
But it’s sacred not just because the people who live here watched helplessly as George Floyd’s life was methodically and intentionally taken from him but because here are commemorated in a thousand individual ways the harm, hatred, and wrongs that people endure, mourn, and refuse to forget. It’s sacred because the manner of his death is a stark and symbolic reminder of the myriad injustices and cruelties inflicted on and resisted by marginalized people for centuries.
A couple of blocks north, a sheet of plywood leans against a streetlight pole; red lettering on a white background declares, “You are now entering the Free State of George Floyd,” an allusion to the Irish nationalist area in Derry, Northern Ireland, during the Troubles. On the curb in front of the large image of George Floyd and behind a cluster of plastic yellow flowers leans a small placard with “NO+” scrawled on it, an echo of the slogan — No mas — symbolizing Chileans’ resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship. Atop the fist sculpture in the center of the square where 38th and Chicago intersect flies a red, black, and green Pan-African flag, a symbol of the African Diaspora and of Black liberation in the U.S. Nearby, in a small neighborhood park, artists installed 134 white “gravestones,” each bearing the name of a Black or Brown woman or man, most of whom were killed by police. The markers are arranged in a grid like those in a national cemetery, implying that they, too, are victims of a war. And on the street and buildings and traffic signs, activists and residents spray-painted, chalked, and scrawled messages reminding us of other injustices, of which George Floyd’s murder is but one among many: STOP ALL PIPELINES, JUSTICE FOR WINSTON SMITH, F12, and FREE LEONARD PELTIER.
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Sculpture one block east of George Floyd Square Cup Foods is the 2-story bldg. on the right
Inside the circle surrounding the raised brown fist, yard signs bear the images of other victims, and across the bottom of each is written the same demand: Justice for Ma’Khia Bryant, Justice for Ahmaud Arbery, Justicia para Adam Toledo. And clipped to a white cord strung above the sidewalk in front of Cup Foods and near the patch of asphalt where George Floyd was murdered are dull yellow letters on a small black sign: “Be thankful we are Godfearing because we do not seek revenge. We seek justice!”
But what exactly constitutes justice? Does justice for Michael Brown, who was shot six times by then-officer Daren Wilson in Ferguson look the same as justice for Tamir Rice, the twelve-year-old playing with a pellet gun outside of a Cleveland rec center and shot dead by Officer Timothy Loehmann? Is it the same for Botham Jean, who was shot and killed in his own apartment by an off-duty Dallas police officer, and for Atatiana Jefferson, killed when an officer shot her as she stood in front of a window in her Fort Worth home? Is a sentence of 22½ years with the possibility of parole after fifteen actually justice for George Floyd, for his seven-year-old daughter Gianna, or for his younger brother Philonese?
Reciting again and again, from the time we are small children, that we are “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” does not make it so. Indoctrination through rote memorization makes it increasingly difficult as we grow up to realize and admit that we are capable of injustice, enablers of injustice, and not only unable but unwilling to see injustice when we look directly in its face.
Injustice cannot be undone or amended. We must, instead, confront injustice and admit to our own culpability in it without excuses or rationalization, recognize it for the immediate and enduring harm it causes all, and remember it as a horrific fault of our past that we cannot and will not allow to be the way forward.
