A knee on the neck of American freedom
George Floyd riots in the US this week bring up old wounds – not that the president cares
Former Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes.Nine minutes.Bystanders screamed for Chauvin to stop.Floyd said: "I can’t breathe" and "I’m about to die".Officially, he was declared dead on arrival at the hospital. Probably, he was already dead before he got there.The video clip — a knee of a white cop on a black man’s neck — is a symbol of everything that is broken in the US.Protests spread like wildfire across the land of the (not so) free, which is punch drunk from the coronavirus pandemic that has taken more than 100,000 US lives — a disproportionate number of whom are, thanks to long-entrenched health-care inequalities, so-called people of colour — and put 41-million Americans out of work as the economy implodes.These are old wounds. Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Rodney King beaten by white cops in LA. The Jim Crow laws. Young black men hanging from trees in the south. Activists buried in the Mississippi mud. Twenty Afri...
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