Editor’s note: This special edition of Black Issues in Philosophy is being run to provide insight into the recent killing of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers. The racial unrest following the killing has been described as the most widespread in the USA since 1968.
I recently posed a series of tweets at my twitter account @lewgord. I offer them here since they might be of interest as many of our readers are no doubt in the midst of debating these events. My comments might already be the positions of many as well, in which case they function as statements of solidarity.
- As #DuBois argued, the double standards of American justice, saturated with racism, makes white people deputies of the state. That is why the 2nd Amendment is a sham. Only white people really have that right [to bear arms]. #PoliceViolence against blacks versus whites bearing arms prove this.
- The witnesses to #DerekChauvin’s slaying #GeorgeFloyd should have been able to intervene and make a citizens’ arrest of an officer attempting murder. The reality of only white citizens having that authority meant no intervention and the resulting homicide.
- The various recordings, gone viral, makes the bystanders and now the nation and the world witnesses of [ongoing] #PoliceViolence. Anger is always ultimately against the self. Turned inward, it leads to an implosion, which means, short of that, witnesses must explode.
- The #Police do not protect the people but instead specific races and classes of them. They function as a gang whose structural hypocrisy includes breaking unions while hiding under the protection of their powerful union.
- It is patronizing that people who rely on #police miscarriage of justice claim that black rebels are only hurting themselves when they’re in fact damaging property they don’t even own. If they were actually hurting themselves, those self-righteous critics would care less.
- A healthy response would be an active citizenry devoted to diminishing—perhaps even eliminating—the #police and other mechanisms of a militarized racist state.
- #LawEnforcement should be for members of the community, not against them; it should not be for an exclusive group of people. It should be under community jurisdiction. As it stands, “law” [in the USA] is under the auspice of de facto criminals entrusted to enforce another law beneath the Law.
- The law beneath the law of #WhiteSupremacistSociety is the protection of white people and the degradation and massacring of all those considered a threat to that hegemony.
- #AgainstPoliceViolence: It is always healthy for people to fight against forces that dehumanize them.
- #AgainstPoliceViolence: We should remember that people are more important than property. No people, no democracy. #Democracy can exist without the #police. #Property and #StructuralInequality rely on their protection.
- The fight #AgainstPoliceViolence, #AgainstWhiteSupremacy, #AgainstRacism is a fight for #democracy, #dignity, and #freedom. It’s a fight for what’s right.
- #Truth #AgainstPoliceViolence: Here are some of the ways law enforcement officers [used violence to keep] the [so-called] peace on Saturday [May 30, 2020].
- We continue to suffer from 2 #pandemics: #COVID19 and incompetent, malevolent anti-democratic leadership from the USA to Brazil to India intoxicated by a fascist cocktail with an overdetermined, global effect: death.
Lewis Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. His recent books include Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021); Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and Penguin Books, 2022); Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon (Bloomsbury, 2023); and “Not Bad for an N—, No?”/ «Pas mal pour un N—, n'est-ce pas? » (Daraja Press, 2023). Thirtieth Anniversary editions of his books Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Humanity Classics) and Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (Routledge) are forthcoming 2025.
