Hope

 Yesterday, while I was distracted by balls, I forgot to write about an amazing thing that happened in America.

A man was found guilty of murder for kneeling on someone’s neck until they died. The person had pleaded for him to stop, saying that he couldn’t breathe and bystanders had tried to intervene and even called the Police. This was the weirdest thing because the man doing the killing was the Police and he had two buddies watching him.  I like to think that if that happened in England the bystanders would have pulled the policeman off him but this was America and the buddies had guns and a right, almost bordering on duty, to use them.

The policeman, Derek Chauvin’s eyes flitted wildly around the room as the verdicts were returned. His brain tried everything to try to process what had happened and failed. He didn’t cry. There was no emotion just incomprehension. 

In his mind, I’m sure, he still believes that he did nothing wrong. The man, in his mind, was a dangerous criminal on drugs. The world sees it differently. We see a man, George Floyd, targeted because of the colour of his skin and not believed when he told the police officer that he couldn’t breathe. The world knows that it was institutional racism that led to this poor man’s death. Derek Chauvin still doesn’t. Many of his colleagues still won’t. They will believe that he was made an example of to appease the growing loud voices of the people who don’t understand how ‘difficult black people are to police’. Our voices would like them to understand that black people are just people. 

I hope this case starts to change things. I hope it makes the police everywhere look at their policies. I hope it makes individual policemen stop and consider whether they are treating someone differently because of a perceived personality trait linked to their skin colour. I hope it makes them ban kneeling on people’s necks at any time. And I hope they ban guns and the freedom with which they use them.

As I type this list of hopes I am feeling more depressed because one police officer going to prison is not going to change the system or stop racism and it could entrench a feeling of them and us, which would make the situation even worse.

I hope I’m wrong.