How George Floyd and Covid have brought us closer together

When I first heard the slogan: Black Lives Matter, like the former New Yorker that I am, I immediately thought: “Well, who’s going to say that they don’t agree with THAT?”

It is almost perfect in its mixture of the obvious; the benign, the plea; the demand, a bit of the banal, and the implication of exclusion if you don’t agree. Perfect for our communal age when to not go along with the crowd is Not Good.

Black Lives Matter is certainly not the Black Power demand of my youth. This slogan pretty much challenged the very epicentre of The Empire that had helped enslave our ancestors. We Baby Boomers wanted power, not understanding. Certainly not friends.

Black Power, like everything in our society, eventually was corralled into everyday use. Made ok. A money-generating engine. A Thing.

At one point, a soap company used a fist exploding out of the top of a pile of clean washing, to imply the power of their product. And yep, we bought the soap.

The demand Black Lives Matter has been around for a while. There had been other African Americans killed by the police in the time that the logo emerged into general consciousness.  That horrible roll call, off the top of my head includes Freddie Gray; Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor.

So far, these people and their families have had no justice in any sense that is generally accepted. But the family of George Floyd has. This is almost unprecedented. 

Because the murder of George Floyd was in that American tradition of lynching black people, most especially black men. These were murders as performance, meant as methods of control and demonstrations of power. 

We see the eyes of George Floyd’s killer, staring into the camera, daring all of us to Do Something. But to Do Something meant death for the witness if the witness was black and so you kept quiet and kept your door locked and prayed that they did not come for you and yours. This knowledge/wisdom was bred in.

Most of us African Americans, born and raised above the Mason Dixon Line, are descendants of the people of The Great Migration from the South after World War I. We know about lynchings, even if we never saw one.

Moving around is in our blood, looking for an escape from the ghetto of poor housing, bad school buildings, poor hospitals, the police. It’s in us, even if we can’t escape.

George Floyd moved too. He moved up to Minneapolis only to discover that it was not part of, what many movie-goers might think, the ‘Minnesota nice’ of a Coen Brothers film. Not for him.

The aftermath of his life, how it was atoned for, in part, by the murder verdict itself, by the millions of dollars in settlement, is not a lesson to learn from, a lesson to live by. 

I think we need to go deeper, to the hidden engine of this latest movement. It is that old driver of change, the one that our species has endured for millennia. Mass plague. Pandemic.

The typhoid fever epidemic of 430 BCE killed Pericles and his death brought the end of the golden age.
Marcus Aurelius, the last emperor of the so-called Pax Romana, may have died as a result of what scientists think might have been a vicious outbreak of smallpox or measles, the cause of the pandemic known as The Antonine Plague. It devastated Rome, weakening it and making it ripe for invasion.

There is the Cyprian Plague of 50 CE and much longer, which some scientists believe to have been Ebola, and the first virus that travelled from an animal host to human beings. Its ongoing attack so depleted the Roman Empire that it was one of the causes for its retreat in the fifth century from Britain, causing the people left behind to seek help elsewhere to defend themselves against the Picts and the Scots.

They sought help from the Saxons of the region now known as Germany and the Netherlands. They came over, and as the saying goes: the rest is history.

The almost total wipeout of the indigenous peoples of American under the benign title of The Columbian Exchange involved peoples facing  European diseases that they had zero immunity against. Their near-extinction turbocharged the trans-Atlantic slave trade out of Africa. For one reason, to replace the population.

And the devastation of 100 years ago known as The Spanish Flu, actually first detected at a military base in Kansas, was the H1N1 virus. It wiped out half a billion people worldwide. It will take us longer than a hundred years to understand what its aftermath has created.

History, indeed, may decide that besides BLM, what made the justice movement so powerful, and helped to deliver the jury’s verdict on George Floyd’s death, was Covid-19.

And that as a result, we have found a kind of solidarity. For Something. Against Something.

And so we, marching in compassion and solidarity to protest, are, too, the examples of the result of the hammer of mass contagion.

Human beings in time, working out our own trauma and rage.

Freud nailed it when he wrote: “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.”

An African American man’s public death, at the hands of a cop, may have also unleashed something basic and ancient in our species.

What do you think? Have your say on this and more by emailing letters@theneweuropean.co.uk