On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man was arrested on a charge of passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a grocery store in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A white police officer knelt on his neck while he was lying face down handcuffed on the street and repeatedly telling the officer “I can’t breathe.” He died of cardiac arrest caused by the nearly nine-minute neck compression which restricted blood flow to the brain.
Security camera footage and videos made by witnesses circulated widely, triggering fiery protests in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. The protest drew sympathy demonstrations in many cities across the United States like what the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.in 1968 sparked all over America.
Floyd had been a truck driver and a restaurant security guard, a job he lost due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He had been imprisoned twice for armed robbery and three times for possession of cocaine. King was a Christian minister and civil rights activist, becoming in 1955 the most prominent spokesperson and the leader in the Civil Rights Movement in the US. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for combating racial inequality through non-violent resistance.
The explanation of why the death of Floyd at the hands of a policeman has caused so much civil unrest as the murder of King by a white supremacist may be found in the messages in the placards carried by the Minneapolis protesters. “We’ve had enough!,” “It’s about time,” the placards say.
What makes the Floyd death overwhelming are the many other violent events that happened just months before — the killings of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, of Steven Taylor in California, of Sean Reed in Indiana, and of Adrian Medearis in Texas by white supremacists and white policemen.
On Feb. 23, three white Americans on a truck followed 25-year-old black American Ahmaud Arbery while he was jogging on the road in Brunswick, Georgia. One of them fired his shotgun at the young man to get “rid of the nigger.”
On March 7, police shot Steven Taylor after he wielded a baseball bat inside a local Walmart in San Leandro, California. Steven was going through a mental health crisis that day.
On March 13, Louisville policemen in plain clothes entered the apartment of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old black emergency medical technician, to serve a “no-knock warrant.” Thinking the officers were intruders, Taylor’s boyfriend fired at the policemen, who returned fire. After the exchange of gunfire, Breonna was found dead with eight bullet wounds.
On April 24, Adrian Medearis, 48, “a talented gospel recording artist on the rise” in Houston, was shot and killed when he resisted being placed in handcuffs by an officer who was trying to arrest him on an overspeeding charge.
On May 6, Dreasjon “Sean” Reed, 21, was ordered to pull over after Indianapolis officers noticed him driving “recklessly.” When Reed began to flee on foot after alighting from his car, officers shot and killed him.
As the placards say, African-Americans have had enough. It’s about time they asserted their civil and human rights. And so they vented their ire by holding protest rallies on the very street where George Floyd breathed his last as well as on other streets of Minneapolis and of its twin city St. Paul.
The protest caused similar demonstrations in many cities across the United States, necessitating the deployment of National Guard troops in more than 20 states to handle the marches that turned violent and destructive of properties.
The protest against racism and police brutality has also gathered support across the globe. Protests have taken place in Canada. Thousands marched in the streets of Toronto, St. John’s, Whitehorse, and Calgary to denounce police brutality against black and indigenous people. In Latin American countries, where blacks constitute a significant percentage of the population, large protest rallies have been held in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires.
In Europe, large crowds have gathered in London, Berlin, and Amsterdam to denounce racism. In Africa, the land of the black race, the killing of Floyd has been condemned in Nigeria and Kenya. In the Middle East, hundreds gathered in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and East Jerusalem demanding “Justice for Floyd” and “Justice for Eyad,” the latter referring to an unarmed, autistic Palestinian man killed by Israeli police.
Big crowds gathered in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Adelaide to express solidarity with “all the people who have been oppressed, and exploited, and brutalised by the system.” In Auckland, New Zealand thousands of people chanted “black lives matter.”
Ironically, there has been no similar demonstration of outrage over human rights violations in the Philippines, where killings and arbitrary detentions, as well as the vilification of dissent are committed with impunity, according to the report of the Commission on Human Rights of the United Nations released last June 4.
The report noted that many of the human rights concerns it has documented are long-standing, but have become more acute in recent years. This has been manifested particularly starkly in the widespread and systematic killing of thousands of alleged drug suspects. Numerous human rights defenders have also been killed over the past five years.
“While there have been important human rights gains in recent years, particularly in economic and social rights, the underpinning focus on national security threats — real and inflated — has led to serious human rights violations, reinforced by harmful rhetoric from high-level officials,” the report stated. The UN Human Rights Office has also documented that between 2015 and 2019, at least 248 human rights defenders, legal professionals, journalists, and trade unionists have been killed in relation to their work.
There has been near impunity for these killings, with only one conviction for the killing of a drug suspect in a police operation since mid-2016, the report stated. Witnesses, family members, journalists, and lawyers interviewed by the UN Human Rights Office expressed fears over their safety and a sense of powerlessness in the search for justice, resulting in a situation where “the practical obstacles to accessing justice within the country are almost insurmountable.”
One black American with a record of five imprisonments is killed by a white police officer and the American people are enraged. Tens of thousands of poor Filipinos linked to drugs, many falsely, are killed by Filipino policemen and their secret operatives and the Filipino people cower in silence and resignation.
The proposed anti-terror law would make sure no protest rallies will be mounted against President Duterte’s policies, programs, and decisions, no matter if they are in violation of the Constitution or discriminatory against the Filipino people and favorable to Chinese nationals. Proponents and sponsors of the Anti-Terror Bill assure the people that it is meant to prevent the infiltration of foreign terrorists into the country and will not be used against critics and detractors of the Administration.
The apprehension of students peacefully expressing opposition to the Anti-Terror bill inside the university campus and a low-ranking government functionary doubling as a propagandist of the Administration branding the protesting students terrorists belie all the assurances of the bill’s authors and sponsors. The signing of the bill into law will totally suppress public dissent.
I go back to the placards of the Minneapolis protesters. “We’ve had enough!,” “It’s about time,” the placards say. There was a time when the Filipino people voiced the same message, though in their own native language. “Tama na, sobra na,” they shouted in indignation at the abuses of an authoritarian government. The call reverberated all over the archipelago, leading to the fall of the dictatorship. Obviously that generation of Filipinos is gone.
The present generation seems to be more focused on individual needs rather than on societal needs. It does not believe in the value of political engagement. It is convinced that the president can effectively address the country’s major issues: poverty, unemployment, income inequality, health care inadequacy, environmental degradation, civil unrest, and foreign aggression. This generation submits to the doctrine “The law is the law, it is the president’s.”
Oscar P. Lagman, Jr. is a retired corporate executive, business consultant, and management professor. He has been a politicized citizen since his college days in the late 1950s.
