Analysis. At the funeral of George Floyd, an African-American suffocated to death on May 25, 2020, below the knee of a white policeman in Minneapolis (Minnesota), civil rights veteran Pastor Al Sharpton had previously declared : “You changed the world, George. ” The 46-year-old victim could have been added to the list of “Unarmed black men killed by police every year” – about 250 in the United States. But her nine minutes of agony, filmed by a passerby, did indeed seem to change, if not the world, at least a certain vision that America has of itself.
Impossible, in front of the calm of Derek Chauvin – the police officer convicted of murder on April 20 -, in front of his manifest carelessness to be filmed, to maintain that any context could justify this cruelty; impossible to see in it anything other than an agent who thinks he is doing his job correctly. This apparent normality shattered the argument for the isolated “blunder”, and with it the belief in the American history of a “Bow tending to justice”, in the words of Pastor Martin Luther King.
“Dismantle white supremacy”
Four years after the funeral of Obama’s post-racial dream, “The ‘systemic racism’ suddenly became a buzzword in the United States “, summarizes historian Elizabeth Hinton, author ofAmerica on Fire (“America on fire”, Liveright, 2021, untranslated). In the months following the murder of George Floyd, more than 8,000 anti-racist protests took place, bringing together some 26 million Americans: the largest social movement in US history, made up of a crowd much more diverse than at the time of the civil rights movement.
If it was a question of reconsidering what it is to be African-American one hundred and fifty years after the end of slavery, it was also a question, in a more original way, of reflecting on what it is. than being white. These questions prompted two attempts, White fragility. This racism that white people don’t see (The Arena, 2020), by American sociologist Robin DiAngelo, and How to become anti-racist, by American historian Ibram X. Kendi (Alisio, 2020), at the top of sales for months.
Large and small companies competed for commitments in favor of racial equality, with a lot of anti-racist training, scholarships or promises of diversified employment. Facebook has pledged to double the number of black and Latino employees by 2023. Ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s posted a ” plan to dismantle white supremacy ”.
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