The Murder of George Floyd: The Longest Running Play in America

 


 "Think of Derek Chauvin’s knee. The weight of it. The sadistic centuries deep applied weight of it. It’s brutality. It’s power. It’s ball bearing like, skull like, stone like shape. How the knee’s deadly utility must have given him such pleasure. How George Floyd’s pleas for life must have sharpened that pleasure. (Why else would he have crushed George’s life so slowly?) How this knee was his personally but also the blunt instrument of history, how it did the work his meaty hands could have done strangling George Floyd. But to strangle George Floyd with his hands he would have had to look him in the face, seen his human face. The knee was a brutal coward’s knee.

What was Derek Chauvin thinking? Or, in what part of his brain was he thinking? What reptilian brainstem part? Was he thinking in the same part as the white sailor on a slave ship who chained Africans in the hold and refused them water as they died? Was he thinking in the same part as the slave breaker Edward Covey who savagely beat the teenage Frederick Douglass for having the effrontery to demand the dignity of manhood? The same part as the grinning white Klan members as they hauled another struggling black man into a poplar tree by his neck, then lit a fire under him? Then posed for photos. Was he thinking in the same part as the mounted police in Selma as they charged the peaceful Civil Rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge? Was he thinking in the same part as the killers of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Erik Garner, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Ahmaud Aubrey, etc., etc., etc.? etc.

Which is to say Derek Chauvin was not thinking at all. His knee was not thinking. Derek and his knee were playing their part in the same morality play being performed in America for 400 years. He knew his part—no new lines to memorize— in the longest running play in our history. Every other day the curtain goes up on this play as it is staged in another city or town. The line of cops waiting to audition for leading roles stretches like a blue highway around the neck of this country. But who buys the tickets? Who fills the theater? Whose will is being done in this tedious, blood-curdling, repetitious, racist drama?"

read article by Robert Shetterly
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