Thoughts on the Murder of George Floyd

Since social media has become ubiquitous, we see more police brutality on video than we have in the past. As such, there is a now an identifiable pattern to how these incidents play out. Someone is murdered, a video spreads, people post, comment, meme, and hashtag, pro and anti-black professional talking heads have a feeding frenzy, sometimes there are protests and violent unrest, and everyone moves on after 2-4 weeks, or until the next incident; a similar dynamic to the national response to mass shootings actually.

We have to break this pattern for two reasons. 1) It makes us worse off as a community, probably worse than the actual murder itself, all due respect to the dead. 2) These incidents are being used to control us politically. Our reactions are powerless and predictable and because of this, we are being played.

What these incidents reinforce for us is often our sense of victimhood, anger, hopelessness, traumatization, lack of faith in law enforcement, lack of faith in the legal/political system as a whole, distrust for white people, and knee jerk opposition to viewpoints that don’t put our suffering as priority. Now, as a thought experiment, think of someone you know who fits the following description: an angry, hopeless, victim, deep in an entrenched trauma, believing they have no access in the world to sympathy or vindication from anyone not like them. Ignore the reasons, just or unjust, that they may be feeling this way for a minute and focus on this image. Is this the image of someone in whose future you see greatness, who inspires you to better yourself, whom you would ally yourself with, be lead by, or take a risk on?

In these times, directly after a public execution, I see these feelings expressed in the language of despair and the language of despair just isn’t a powerful way forward. When we succumb to it we cut ourselves off from our real power. Righteous indignation, another emotional color that shows up, betrays itself as the verbal armor that, though intended to protect us from our despair, ends up protecting our despair from us. For, as with most things that live in the dark parts of the psyche, despair must be confronted, looked in the eye, and met with a great force of compassion in order to be conquered. Hiding from it in self-justification only gives it safe space to grow and corrupt the otherwise functional parts of the soul, like mold on forgotten fruit. The same goes, incidentally, for other methods of hiding like spiritual bypassing or wild theorizing. It robs us of our power. I posit that the cycle of social media outrage that never changes anything is a demonstration of this particular powerlessness.

I see such movements toward psychic powerlessness as having sinister implications worse than the incidents that trigger it. For one, it distorts our view of history to a degree that history ceases to be a source of real power, as it should be. These days, it is popular for us to proclaim ourselves God-Kings from Ancient Egypt and the true mothers and fathers of western civilization, or a terminally oppressed people under the knee of the “white” man. I dispute neither the brilliance and black contribution to and from Kemet, nor the scourge of European colonialism in the second half of the 2nd millennium CE, nor centuries of deliberate sabotage of Black progress by the United States government. However, I must reject these identities to retain my agency. I refuse to identify as oppressed because it then becomes quite difficult for me to identify as anything else. That position, born from self righteousness, victimhood, and a not unreasonable interpretation of history, will force me to see my whole life as an instantiation of oppression, which means the possibility of becoming an instantiation of, say, joy, wisdom, honor, fulfillment, holiness, wealth, or victory, without the adjective “oppressed” in front of it, constitutes a psychic suicide. Nor do I identify as a God-King, because while that appellation leaves me with far more and better options, the nagging question of how, precisely, a God-King ended up in these circumstances asserts itself and undermines the identification, forcing me to spend a great deal of energy to maintain it. The self-justification is too much at odds with the circumstances as lived and collapses under its own weight. Thus both of these versions of history leave the community at large famished for both healing and organized coordinated action that employs the full extent of our power.

Here is another perhaps more subtle implication. I noticed around mid 2017 that Black Lives Matter was awfully quiet. It was no longer holding protests, advocating a clear policy agenda (if it ever did), or inciting social media “flame wars” like it did in 2016. I developed a kind of silly pet theory that the “movement” was actually backed by Russia and had gone dark because the election was over. This silly pet theory was later confirmed to me in the movie the Great Hack, a documentary about Cambridge Analytica which employed sophisticated profiling technology to aid 45’s campaign. In short, I am of the opinion that the publicizing of black executions, the hashtag activism, and the black lives matter “movement” in 2016 was being manipulated to create emnity and push white people toward 45.

So the fact that, in the past 3-4 weeks, during an election cycle, we have had 4 publicized racial incidents, 3 of them executions, and 2 of them by police, compared to few publicized executions from 2017 to now, makes me suspect that racism and black executions are becoming a useful political tools in the age of the internet. It feels to me like we are being played again, and the more predictable our reaction, and inaction, the more useful the game to those running it. By the way, I am not making any accusations as to who might be doing so, as race has been a useful wedge for various political parties throughout American history. However my indignation at being played for a fool makes me want to call out the cycle of internet outrage. Perhaps this is some of the wild theorizing I cautioned against earlier. I believe that my point still stands, especially as we consider where to find real power.

Hunting my real power has been a comfort and a guide for me during this time. This process involves identifying where my power is and where it isn’t, and distributing my efforts and time as such. Personally, I have had no agency over any of the publicized executions of Black People as I was not there to witness or stop the incidents. Thus I resist the movement of trauma guilt free and with integrity as that movement, induced by incidents in the past over which I had no agency, is a relinquishing of my power. And when we succumb to it as a community we relinquish our collective power.

But given that we still have a persistent problem, what approach allows us to find real power, then? Here are a few questions. What tactics can I employ when witnessing police brutality first hand, from negotiation, to putting physical pressure on an offending officer as an individual or group? What is my ability to defend myself or another, with or without a weapon? What does it look like to have a consistent and organized political presence as an individual and community? What does it mean to be an artist and thinker whose craft influences the world only indirectly? What about an entrepreneur or an office person who must navigate the opinions of investors or a company culture? How do my decisions around spirituality, religion, and faith show up as forces for both power and weakness? But, the real question at the base of all this is the following: How much do I actually care and what I would be willing to sacrifice for another. When asking this question from a place of curiosity and compassion, without self-judgment, without identifying, a priori, as hero or villain, we discover that the true answer to this ultimate question is, in fact, the very life we have chosen to lead. Accepting the joy and pain of this answer fully, we have the power to change any of the above parameters and more, if we so choose. But, until we can answer that question with honesty and clarity, we remain caught in a cycle controlled by manipulation and circumstance.

And nothing will change.