Under the baobab: Could the Derek Chauvin trial bring about a new day for our nation?

The trial of officer Derek Chauvin for killing George Floyd has begun. The facts are irrefutable. We all watched while Floyd begged to be allowed to breath. Ignoring his pleas, Chauvin pressed his knee onto Floyd’s throat for over eight minutes. What’s at issue is whether Chauvin’s behavior is negligent, criminal or justified. The real question is — have we as a nation progressed to the point of being able to punish a white cop for publicly lynching a black man? The video should be dispositive; it is not.

In 1991 millions of people saw a tape of Rodney King being beaten mercilessly by the police. Even President Bush said: “What I saw made me sick. It’s sickening to see the beating that was rendered. There’s no way in my view to explain it away. It was outrageous.” Four officers were charged with assault. Though the incident had taken place in Los Angeles the trial’s venue was changed to Simi Valley, a white suburb. A year later a jury that had no Black members acquitted the four officers.

I was in LA doing graduate work at The American Film Institute. When the not guilty verdict was announced, the mostly Black and Hispanic South Central section of LA exploded. I spent the five days of the insurrection riding around on a Red Cross van distributing bottle water and food snacks to police, emergency responders, and insurrectionists alike. The mood in the community was fearful, angry and profoundly disappointed that despite the presence of video evidence to the contrary, the jury found that the police had done no wrong.

At least 50 people lost their lives; many were killed by police action. More than 2,000 people were injured, 6,000 were arrested. Over 3,000 businesses were destroyed or damaged, there was over $1 billion in damages. The entire incident brought to mind a desperate wolf chewing off his own leg to escape a trap.

Here in Centre County we have experienced our own police outrage. Osaze Osagie was killed by Officer Pieniazek while trying to serve a 302 mental health warrant. Subsequent investigations by the Borough police department, the District Attorney’s office and the Pennsylvania State Police found the officers had “abided by their training and were not guilty of any malfeasance or misfeasance.” The Osagie family filed a wrongful death civil lawsuit against the police and the Borough, which is still pending.

The killing of Black people, particularly Black men, by police and paralegal perpetrators of extralegal violence is not new. It is one of the columns that support the edifice of white supremacy. The Washington Post says over 1,000 people were killed by police action in 2019. Black people were two and a half times more likely to be killed by the police.

Lynching, another branch of the same tree, is also historically rooted in the maintenance of white supremacy. Physical violence and the threat of violence creates a climate that promotes terroristic racial control. According to the Tuskegee Institute, over 3,500 African Americans were lynched between 1882 and 1968. As South Carolina Senator Tillman said on the floor of the Senate in 1900:

“We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him”

Sisters and brothers, we stand at the edge of a new dawning. We shall either continue to follow the arcane and evil principles of the Senator Tillmans of our world or, allowing the scales to fall from our eyes, we will step into the brightness of a new day. The jury will decide.