Trahern Crews, portavoce del movimento Black lives matter racconta la realtà di Minneapolis, metropoli simbolo delle disuguaglianze.
George Floyd, the African-American man who was killed in brutal fashion by police performing an arrest, quickly became a symbol of the oppression and violence suffered by people of colour in the United States. The pain and anger of thousands burst forth in Minneapolis. Day after day, fires burned in protest and anger over a murder that will leave a mark on the city’s memory. Demonstrations were soon taking place all over the country, in dozens of major cities – including Los Angeles, New York and Detroit – as well as hundreds of smaller cities and towns. In Detroit, a 19-year-old man who was taking part in the protests was killed as a car pulled up and fired shots into the crowd. Three more people lost their lives in similar circumstances elsewhere, and a curfew was imposed on 25 major urban centres. These kinds of numbers hadn’t been seen since the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, in 1968.
Why is this been happening in the country that sees itself as the “world’s greatest democracy”? In fact, George Floyd’s case is far from unusual. It can best be described as the straw that broke the camel’s back, an event that opened the floodgates and let the rage and indignation of an oppressed people spill out. The killing of black people at the hands of the police is a regular occurrence in the United States: just as the tragedy was taking place in Minneapolis, Tony McDade, a black trans man, was fatally shot by police in Florida.
Although the problem exists all across the United States, Minneapolis is a city that represents the situation better than most. In 2019, it was ranked as the 4th most dangerous metropolitan area for black Americans. The city presents genuine cases of segregation and ghettoisation, with skin colour being heavily stigmatised.
“Being a Black person in Minneapolis, whose ancestors descend from slavery, means we are 10 times more like to be pulled over by police or killed by the police than our white counterparts,” explains Trahern Crews, a spokesman for Black Lives Matter in Minnesota. “Not only are these systemic issues rooted in racism. We have the biggest economic inequalities and the biggest wealth gaps between whites and blacks in America. We have the biggest healthcare gaps, housing disparities, et cetera. This makes it easier for the police to harm us without being held accountable”.
Historically speaking, policeman Derek Chauvin‘s knee pressing down on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes, slowly killing him, is nothing new. What’s new is that technology is leading to more and more of these violent incidents being documented. “Things like this have been happening to Black people in America for 400 years,” says Crews. “The invention of the cellphone camera has been such a powerful tool in the fight against police brutality and institutional racism. It is now showing the world what we have been going through in this country for 400 years”.
George Floyd is the fifth person to have died at the hands of police in Minneapolis since 2017: in four of those five cases, the victims were black. The same thing had happened to Philando Castle in 2016 and Jamar Clark in 2015. Investigations into these killings have ended either with acquittals or, at best, with officers being fired. The only case that ended in a conviction involved a black officer, Mohamed Noor, who was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison. In the city, only 1 per cent of complaints relating to police abuse have led to a conviction since 2012. Furthermore, over 60 per cent of victims of police shootings in Minneapolis between 2009 and the end of May 2019 were African American.
