May 25th marked the one-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd by the police, an event that together with the pandemic and the presidential elections, constitutes one of the most important social processes of 2020 in the United States, since it ultimately defined the future of the political landscape in that country.
The televised murder of the 47-year-old African-American man in Minneapolis sparked outrage to such an extent that the protests led to the emergence of a narrative that promoted a paradigm shift that sought to overcome racism, social inequality, police abuses, among other ills that structurally afflicted American society.
Social unrest spread to almost every city in the United States with a degree of violence that required the use of additional components of the Army to contain it.
This conjunctural process was accompanied by a powerful propaganda apparatus composed of the media, the world of show business and entertainment, sportsmen, activists and politicians, whose purpose was, first and foremost, to put an end to the supposed origin of the evil represented in the questionable and worn-out figure of President Donald Trump.
The mogul president was accused of stirring up white supremacism, and this became the target to be defeated by all that was sheltered behind Black Lives Matter (BLM). All the social discontent was capitalized by the Democrats, who drew an electoral roadmap using the referents of the moment.
Undoubtedly, this defined the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris formula, a duo that was supposed to be in charge of promoting substantial changes in both domestic and foreign policy in the United States. It did not take long for this hopeful myth of the local and global progressive sector to be demolished.
Kamala Harris became the center of the struggle as she was heralded by the mainstream media as a novelty by projecting her as “a courageous fighter in defense of the less powerful”. What was new in this case was that Harris was the first black woman and the first woman of Asian descent to be elected vice president of the country.
Over time it has been demonstrated that it was all a symbolic and cosmetic change intended to take advantage of the political and social moment marked by the anti-racial protests after the death of George Floyd. The façade of the woman daughter of immigrants who “fights for civil rights” has not been enough to achieve any change, particularly because of her record of attacking the poorest sectors of society.
The deaths continue
A year after Floyd’s murder and with a new administration in the White House, not much has changed. A total of 1,127 people were killed by the police in 2020, according to Statista, a German online statistics portal that makes available relevant data from market and opinion studies, as well as other official indicators from many countries.
Apparently, the BLM has not been enough to stem the slaughter of African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement agencies in the North American country.
“The trend of fatal police shootings in the United States appears to be only increasing, with a total of 292 civilians shot, 62 of them black, in the first four months of 2021. In 2020, there were 1021 fatal police shootings, and in 2019 there were 999 fatal shootings. In addition, the rate of fatal police shootings among black Americans was much higher than that of any other ethnicity, standing at 36 fatal shootings per million population in April 2021,” the portal reported.
In the same vein, another organization displaying the map of police violence details that 96% of last year’s killings occurred by police gunfire. Tasers, physical force and police vehicles accounted for most of the other deaths. It also highlights that only 1% of all killings (16 of cases) committed by police were brought to justice.
The Police Violence Report platform compiles “information from media reports, obituaries, public records, and databases such as Fatal Encounters and the WashingtonPost, this report represents the most comprehensive account of fatal police violence in 2020. Our analysis suggests that most police killings in 2020 could have been prevented and that certain policies and practices could prevent police killings in the future.”
As a sign that there is no tracking of police officer behavior, we found that of the 444 cases of officers involved in killings, at least 14 had shot or killed someone before and five had multiple prior shootings.
“Most of the killings began when police responded to alleged nonviolent crimes or to cases in which no crime was reported. 121 people were killed after police stopped them for a traffic violation,” the mapping noted, which is indicative of law enforcement’s disregard for progressive use of force.
George Floyd’s death had these characteristics: the disproportionate use of force to arrest an unarmed man. He died of asphyxiation caused by officer Derek Chauvin, who, after handcuffing him and turning him face down, and with the help of two other officers, pressed him to the pavement with his knee resting on his neck. For nearly nine minutes, under the watchful eye of a fourth officer and other bystanders, Floyd repeated several times that he could not breathe.
Due to the large number of deaths caused by failure to obey the stop sign, some cities have had to disarm traffic officers. In addition to these preventable murders, there are 97 deaths of people with erratic behavior and mental illness. It is worth noting that all of these victims were unarmed. The breakdown of murder of unarmed persons reflects racism and xenophobia:
- Black (27)
- Hispanic (15)
- Native American (1)
- Asians/Pacific Islanders (2)
- White (31)
- Unknown (4)
“Blacks were more likely to be killed by police, more likely to be unarmed, and less likely to be threatening anyone when they were killed,” says Police Violence Report.
Old Racism and Police Abuse
While the death of George Floyd sparked outrage and an unprecedented wave of anti-racist protests in recent years, police abuse became a hot topic in the United States since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson (Missouri) in 2014, during the administration of Barak Obama, the only black president the American country has ever had.
Black Lives Matter itself was formed in 2013 to denounce police brutality in the United States and has since organized marches and demonstrations in response to police killings of black men and women.
That people continue to die at the hands of U.S. police today, especially people of African descent, can be seen as a breach of electoral promise on the part of the Democrats, an ambitious agenda that is difficult to fulfill.
The supremacist image that was forged around Donald Trump awakened a sort of “national unity” that sought to restore “an order” prior to the arrival of the tycoon president. But beyond that lost past, it is assumed that the Biden-Harris formula also brought together other sectors of society that demanded deeper changes in the establishment, in addition to the African-American and sex-diverse communities with their respective demands. This is why the Democratic Party managed to clothe itself in a progressive image that symbolically represented unity and “the good guys”.
Evidently, the Democrats appropriated the just and legitimate struggle agenda of Afro-Americans to project themselves as saviors. But this progressive disguise becomes questionable when one briefly reviews the criminal record of those at the head of government and other key positions in the new administration.
On the one hand, the effervescence of the moment covered up Biden’s record of sexual harassment, racism, as well as his support for segregationist policies and other (not so progressive) social security cuts, and, on the other hand, Harris’ ethnic heritage covered up her record of corruption in police forces and other retrograde judicial policies that she applied when she was California’s District Attorney.
Likewise, one only has to look at the names of those in the cabinet to know that this is a transition to the Obama era. Many of the visible faces in strategic positions belonged to the deep state, characterized by a history of espionage, interventionism and coups d’état.
The Woke Doctrine in the White House
The new White House administration has been able to mimic “noble causes” that appeal to awareness and social and racial justice. This is commonly referred to as the Woke Doctrine which, according to Argemiro Barro, becomes “a solid identity orthodoxy.”
“Some of the most elite campuses in the Democratic states are beginning to exhibit the traits of small fundamentalist regimes. Guided by a theory that does not allow for doubt and sheltered by the indignation unleashed by cases such as the murder of George Floyd, their rectories have created powerful committees, ideologized the syllabus and even organized public confessions of racial prejudice,” stated the journalist and researcher.
Barro points out that this tendency to hypersensitize racial and gender issues has quickly crept into progressive universities to such an extent that mandatory courses have been created for racial sensitization.
However, everything seems to indicate that this doctrine points more to an issue of form, of publicly pointing out and judging the hints of racism and homophobia in the discourse. According to Kendi and DiAngelo, one must train one’s senses “by learning to spot it, question it and fight it; by learning to be ‘woke,’ to be ‘awake’ to the terrible aggressions that nestle in words and behaviors.”
In an article published in Unz Review, the analyst better known as The Saker is quoted as saying:
“(…) it is indisputable that the woke ideology is at the forefront of the Biden Administration and so cannot simply be ignored. Of course, other ideological tendencies of the U.S. ruling class (messianism, imperialism, cult of self, capitalism, etc.) have not been abandoned; instead, they have been ‘wokified’ in the sense that woke ideology is now used to give these traditional U.S. ideologies a kind of politically correct imprimatur.”
Immediate offense and the culture of cancellation are part of this ideology that seeks to impose a morality in a police-like manner; where the racial, for example, becomes a straitjacket, but only superficially.
If the United States adopts this position, it does so unquestionably from the point of view of this superfluous morality. That U.S. embassies and consulates fly the gay pride flag next to the Stars and Stripes is not an indication that they respect life in the countries where they intervene. Nor does this facade serve to stop the racism installed in the culture while cases like George Floyd’s continue to occur by the hundreds and thousands.
“To some, this is just a big money making scheme for corporate ‘America’ that is now flooding all their ads with the right races in total disregard of that race’s actual percentage of the population and small money making scheme for those hoping to get some free money. As for the American homo-lobby, this is a sure way to achieve power and influence they could not otherwise dream of. To put it another way, Wokism is about money and power, not justice,” he concludes.
Translation by Internationalist 360°