Tag: George Floyd

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Power and Professionalism

Power differentials as an integral part of an institution’s structure are not as common as people might assume. In some respects, power differentials are pervasive, such as in employment situations. Most people have a boss, and he or she does have power over his or her employees. However, a boss’s power is relatively limited in scope. If abused, typically, the worst that can happen is losing the job and the associated finances. Also, there is usually a human resources department or some type of accountability mechanism in place to prevent or deal with abuses of power, however moderately effective they might be.

Conversely, teaching at the post-secondary level has almost no checks on a professor’s power, and yet, it is, by and large, a remarkably ethical profession. Professors have considerable latitude in the structure of their courses, in their policies, and in their application of them, and the grades they assign remain on their students’ transcripts for the rest of their lives.

This level of professionalism in academia is particularly striking since most professors do not get any training in teaching, aside from teaching assistantships, which are not necessarily required, or even in ethics. Granted, it usually takes a minimum of a decade of full-time study to earn a doctorate degree, which is its own form of training. Nonetheless, the ethical standard is unspoken yet implicitly understood by all professors – treat your students fairly.

As an aside, it is this consistent level of professionalism that led to the medical profession, which has been plagued by various ethical scandals, most recently, its role in the nation’s opioid epidemic, adopting the academic title of “doctor.” It is and will always be an academic title. Even though the ultimate culpability lies with the police officers, it should also be noted that the opioid epidemic, fueled by the medical and the pharmaceutical industries, was a contributing yet overlooked factor in the murder of George Floyd.

A key aspect to treating all students fairly is having a clear policy in place and applying it uniformly. In considering any one student’s request, the question to ask is: given the student’s situation and the policy, would granting the student’s request be fair to the student and to the rest of the class? One needs to consider both the student making the request and the other students in the class.

It is also understood that no matter how the student might have treated the professor or the professor’s personal feelings regarding the student, his or her grade must be based strictly on his or her performance in the class. Needless to say, the student’s performance in any other class or any other behavioral issues cannot factor into the professor’s assessment of the student’s performance or the professor’s treatment of the student, which always needs to be mature, professional, and proportional.  

Law enforcement does not share academia’s reputation for professionalism, and its implicitly understood guidelines do not seem to be followed, despite the explicit training for police officers, but they should be. Equal treatment is the cardinal rule that must be observed when power differentials exist, particularly as part of an institutional structure.

There is a clear power differential between the police and the people they are called to serve and protect. Police brutality is fundamentally an abuse of power. Instead of the equal treatment that is simply taken for granted in academia, in policing, there are often clear biases and reactions that are grossly disproportionate to the offense. Also, as we have seen sadly too many times, unlike in the academic context, a police officer’s abuse of power can be deadly for the victim.

This article suggests that Derek Chauvin’s defense argues that fear was a motiving factor for his conduct. I would argue that the correct expectation is the academic standard and that the police’s feelings, no matter what they are including fear, should never be a factor. Police officers are to completely separate their emotions from the execution of their duties.

Instead, we see that particularly for Derek Chauvin, but also for J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao, their emotions governed their every action and that from the very beginning of their interaction with George Floyd and his companions, the police were completely out of control of themselves and of the situation. Within minutes of approaching the parked car George Floyd was sitting in, responding to nothing but the alleged use of a counterfeit $20 bill, a police officer pulled his gun and aimed it at Floyd.

How could this reaction possibly be equal treatment? It was not. It was prejudicial treatment, based on Floyd’s appearance, who was a big, black man. His prior record, if even known to the police at the time, was completely irrelevant to the potential petty offense they were called to resolve. It was emotional and egotistical. It was about their assertion of their power. It was about forcing someone, who is made in the image of God and granted by him with free will, to submit to their will.

It was uncontrolled. Floyd’s altered state of mind was equally irrelevant to the potential offense. If anything, his state placed more burden on the police officers to act in a controlled and calm manner instead of what we saw, which was the opposite. Their reaction was also grossly disproportionate to the potential offense. It was unprofessional, and, unfortunately, it was deadly. It was none of the things one would expect of a professional police response, and it resulted in the police murdering George Floyd.

Police culture needs to change. There needs to be the expectation for police officers that with great power comes great responsibility. As in academia, the onus is on the person with the power to always be in control of him or herself and to use that power judiciously and fairly. If one cannot do this, the person should simply not become a police officer. If one does not do this and abuses one’s power, as in this case, the person should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

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We Are Releasing Evil’s Death Grip

Death Grip

George Floyd was murdered by the Minneapolis Police on Memorial Day, May 25, 2020, a national holiday dedicated to mourning our military personnel who have died while serving our country. Surrounded by death from Covid 19, his singular death, on a day marked to pay our respects to prior deaths, seemed to paradoxically release the death grip on our country, as we threw ourselves into resurrecting it and rejecting evil.

This paradox was alluded to on our first brief post, “The specter of death now looms over the world as nature enters a period of rebirth. It might seem paradoxical, until one considers that it is also Lent, and life, death and rebirth have been married together in that context for approximately 2,000 years.”

Our nation’s rebirth has also overlapped with Pentecost Sunday, which was May 31, 2020, a day when the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles and gave them the fortitude, comfort and aid that they would need to spread the truth and the faith.

We are apostles of a different sort, as we take our demands for justice, our messages of love, peace, equality, of everything good and holy to a country that has been darkened by power, greed, corruption, betrayal and all manner of sin, in short, to a country that has fallen prey to the forces of evil.

Today, June 6, 2020 is the 76th anniversary of D-Day, when Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, France in Operation Overlord during World War II. It is a day when the forces of good staged a pivotal battle in their war against the forces of evil, a day when Allied forces started to release the Nazi’s death grip on Europe, and anti-fascists faced down fascists and eventually won the war.   

For Americans, the past almost two weeks, starting May 26, 2020, when many of us first found out about George Floyd’s murder, have been some of the most emotionally taxing days in our memory. His murder was the catalyst for the outpouring of anger, frustration and sadness that had been building for many of us for years about the gross injustices our black sisters and brothers face on a daily basis.

As Wortham wrote in an essay titled, A Glorious Poetic Rage, “Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil rights organization Color of Change, speculated that it was the stark cruelty of the video of George Floyd’s death that captivated the country.”

The poetry of the moment is part of the country’s collective poetic anthology. Many on the right have tried to frame the present protests as unpatriotic or un-American, as an assault on “law and order,” but their characterizations could not be further from the truth. They are lies, and they are liars.

Following in the footsteps of honorable generations upon generations of Americans who have fought to defend our country, our protests are our psalms of communal lament for and our songs of love to our nation. They are our latest expressions of patriotism, and we are our country’s present defenders.

Let us not minimize the critical nature of this moment. We are the defenders of good, and we are in a battle against evil. We are fighting to unclench the fist that has been squeezing the breath and life out of our country and its people. (See this post for context.)

Just as our country’s citizens change, the poetic language of our citizens change. “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death,” “Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty,” have taken on a more personal tone, as our cries repeat the final words of the victims of state-sanctioned violence, “I Can’t Breathe,” “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” to the simple assertion of black Americans’ humanity, a statement that had once been (and perhaps still is) the subject of controversy, “Black Lives Matter.”

Good Against Evil’s Death Grip

As in World War II, Americans are in a life and death battle against the forces of evil. Our lives are literally at stake, as is our democracy. We need to do everything we can to protect it from tyranny and fascism. Let us speak directly of this evil. As we spoke all of the names of the victims of police violence, let us speak the name of this evil that is destroying our country.

The devil does not just reside across an ocean, in a foreign country, speaking in a foreign tongue, but, our dear Americans, it lives in the people’s house. It has taken hold of our sacred national spaces and tried to force upon our country’s capital its death grip under the guise of relatively innocuous-sounding phrases, such as “flood the zone.”

Hiding in a bunker within the White House, fortified with fences upon fences, this evil man turned the country’s military, which is meant to protect us against our foreign enemies, against its own citizens, sometimes supplemented with unidentified men in heavily-armed riot gear.

These various armed forces have been attacking and harming peaceful protesters. In one case, this evil man did so to desecrate a sacred Christian house of worship while brandishing the Bible, which he never reads. This evil is trying to impose a fascist death grip on our nation’s capital and on our country.

This evil inhabits a soulless man named Donald J. Trump. Conway writes, “As a New Yorker profile of Trump put it nearly a quarter-century ago, Trump lives ‘an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.’ That’s Donald Trump’s problem yesterday, today and tomorrow.”

It is his eternal problem because as a child of darkness, he seems incapable of emitting one ounce of light. Instead, like a black hole, Trump functions by sucking everything into the demonic, empty, narcissistic shell of his person.

Trump’s Death Grip and His Satanic Cults

Let us not fool ourselves into thinking that the devil walks alone. He is accompanied by secular sycophants and religious mercenaries who have sold their professed “Christian” faith for their own personal ambitions.

In particularly, many white evangelicals stopped being about anything resembling Jesus. Instead of making themselves more like Jesus, they made Jesus more like themselves. Some of them have given themselves fully over to the dark side. QAnon is a satanic cult that is pretending to be Christian nationalists, which are a form of evil themselves.

However, the problem is not limited to just white evangelicals. Within the Catholic Church, which has had numerous engagements with the unholy while holding high its mantle of holiness, there are abettors of this evil. Most recently, the devil in the Catholic Church takes on the form of a petty man with gloriously meaningless turns of phrases that he recently weaved into a public display of idolization for a false god, Donald Trump.

Against these forces of evil, we are an army of good. We have each other, which is really all we need. We will prevail. We will save our country and ourselves from this present death grip so that it can breathe and so that we can truly live free. As Patrick Henry declared, so do we, “Give us liberty or give us death” because “Black Lives Matter.” We rise and fall together. E pluribus unum.

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George Floyd – Murdered by the Minneapolis Police

George Floyd
Josh Hild on Usplash

Minnesota calls itself the Land of 10,000 Lakes, and Minneapolis was known for its harsh winters and its good quality of life, including its well-maintained parks and lakes. Now, it is known as the city in which George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was cruelly murdered by the Minneapolis police, the men and women in whom we entrust with the great privilege and responsibility of protecting and serving our communities.

The Events Resulting in George Floyd’s Murder

The purported reason for George Floyd’s arrest was a suspected $20 white-collar crime, a fraudulent payment. The real reason was the color of his skin. Thanks to Darnella Frazier, whose account Twitter suspended for an unknown reason, we have the true story, the video of George Floyd’s death, instead of the deceptive story provided in the police report. We thank Darnella, who is only 17-years-old, for her courage, conscience and presence of mind to record it. She was traumatized by the experience, and we pray for her.

George Floyd died with an officer pressing his knee against his neck for over 9 minutes. Floyd’s tortured face pressed into the asphalt, he pled with the officer(s), speaking words that brought back the memory of Eric Garner, “I can’t breathe.” “I can’t breathe,” Floyd says; “I can’t breathe.” He calls out for his mother, “mama,” he says. He urinated on himself. (The graphic video can be found on the Internet.)

There were numerous witnesses. Their panicked concern was palpable, and they begged the officer(s) to release him, to take his knee of the visibly distressed man. The officers did not. You can hear the officers joking as George Floyd is dying. Floyd’s body slowly becomes lifeless, and when the medics came, he no longer had a pulse. He was dead. (A timeline of the events is provided here. )

This is how an American citizen, our brother, a broken man (as we all are) of faith, a human being, a child of God, died. He was treated like an animal, like his life had no value, like his person had no dignity. This is how the men we gave the privilege and responsibility of protecting and serving our communities treated one of our own. They heartlessly murdered George Floyd, and we are angry; we are traumatized; we are heartbroken, and we are fed up. We want peace, justice and revolution – not just change – but a complete transformation of our society.

Our Country Is Broken

The country, which had been suffering under decades of economic mismanagement and rising inequality, reached a fever pitch under the physical and mental stress of the pandemic, the associated shutdown, and its economic devastation. The country was (and still is) a tinder box. This was the spark that lit it on fire, in many cases, literally. Since May 25, 2020, the day George Floyd was wantonly murdered by the Minneapolis Police, there have been protests.

These protests often started out peacefully but, towards evening, would erupt into violence, as a combustible mix of opportunists, anarchists, implementing a modern version of propaganda of the deed, and/or Antifa (a violence-prone, left-wing anti-fascist group) and/or white supremacists (violent right-wing groups) looted, vandalized and terrorized the city, damaging many minority-owned businesses in the process.

Starting Friday, May 29, 2020, the city of Minneapolis was put under curfew from 8PM until 6AM, with violations being a misdemeanor punishable by up to 90 days in jail or a $1,000 fine. On the first night of the curfew, the violence had not really abated. (Images of the protests can be found here.)

The absurdity of the autopsy report is just more proof (as if we needed it) that the problem of systemic racism in our country is not simply about the police department but also a failure of our entire system of “justice.” It is an insult to our intelligence and a disgrace to our country. As Petri wrote, “[I]t is always at the moment that their knee is descending on a human neck, or their bullet is flying toward a man, or they have him in a chokehold, when this human being’s own system decides to turn against him. It is a horrible curse.”

George Floyd to the System Reforming Itself?

The key question is: can the system reform itself, to paraphrase Cornell West, who thinks it cannot. It is understandable why he would think so. It is understandable why the people, particularly younger people, who have been completely failed by the country, its supposed leaders and its institutions, would have no faith in any system within the country being capable of self-reformation.

In fact, despite everything in the news, the protests across the country for which the incident in Minneapolis was the catalyst, the following video was posted on Twitter today.

The justifiably angry driver says to the cop, “Dad a criminal?” Nope. “Dad a thug?” Nope. “Dad shot dead by a cop made a mistake cuz you want to come with your gun drawn.” In other words, even with protests exploding across the country in response to police brutality, as the man explains, the cop came to the car with his gun drawn over the driver not using a turn signal.

We are all too exhausted and emotionally drained to do more than try to process our pain, frustration and anger. It is hard to not feel a deep sense of despair and hopelessness about the state of our country right now. We must keep fighting though, and we have our faith to give us strength. Our deepest condolences to George Floyd’s friends and family. He was known to us, and he will be deeply missed. Fellow Americans, we say this with love – Jesus’s way – the way of peace – is the only way.