On this anniversary of the police murder of George Floyd, a transformative moment in the Reckoning of our nation with institutional and systemic racism, a discredited and corrupt police state of white supremacist terror and brutal tyranny of force and control, and the legacies of historical inequalities and injustices as a national epigenetic illness of racism and power, we mourn the tragedy of his murder, one incident of racist cruelty and the arrogance of power among countless others, but we also celebrate the triumphant solidarity and refusal to submit of the Black Lives Matter movement which it triggered, and which may yet redeem us with transformative change and a reimagination of our possibilities of becoming human.
We meet the moment of this anniversary with all its inchoate multiplicities of meaning, shifting and relative truths, bidirectional forces of reaction and resistance, of despair at our powerlessness as victims of the carceral state, systemic racism, and the sacrifice of our nation’s children by the Republican Party on the altar of their power in refusal to confront an epidemic of gun violence and enact reasonable laws to keep weapons of terror, death, and mass destruction out of the hands of madmen and criminals in subservience to organizations of white supremacist terror like the NRA; in the midst of all of this and the epigenetic trauma and shared public grieving of the legacies of historical and systemic racism and the fetishization of violence and of guns as symbols of white male power and privilege, but also rage which may transform into action.
Look at the faces of the victims of gun violence and white supremacist terror. Why did they die?
They died for the power and wealth of elites for whom their lives are nothing. For this crime there can be no justice, as justice too is owned by those who would enslave us. For the dead we can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged, and the systemic inequality of the business of empire which sacrifices children on the altar of imperial dominion and elite hegemonies of wealth and power wherein the carceral state requires an unchecked and limitless civilian gun market to keep arms manufacturers in business so we are always tooled up to fight vast wars of dominion and defend our markets and control of strategic resources like oil, regardless of the costs of randomly murdered civilians. Indeed this helps the state justify its police forces of occupation and repression of dissent; pervasive gun violence creates fear which the state weaponizes in service to power.
As Joe Biden said; “As a nation, we have to ask, when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”
Regarding solidarity and the total freedom conferred by the act of refusal to submit as Resistance, I have a story to tell you, and a gift to share with you; membership in a tradition of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Here I offer you the Oath of the Resistance, as it was given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut in 1982.
During the summer before my senior year of university in San Francisco, I had set out on a culinary Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, learning to cook the food I loved, and was in Beirut when Israel invaded Lebanon and trapped me in a city under siege. Feral bands of soldiers were roaming the streets committing atrocities; one such unit of the Israeli Defense Forces set some children on fire, laughing and making bets on how far they could run screaming before they fell into pools of blackened ruin and their screams became silent. I found myself fighting them; others joined me, we joined whole networks of such groups already fighting, and more joined us; together we united in mass action with a vast and diverse resistance and liberation struggle. From that day forward I was part of the defense of Beirut against the siege.
A fabulous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world lay on the far side of a sniper alley, which my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across to reach breakfast while the occasional bullet impacted the wall behind us. One day we arrived in our usual high spirits when an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and speaking in French began a conversation with, “I’m told you do this every day, race against death for breakfast.”
To which I replied, “Moments stolen from death belong to us, and set us free. This is all we truly own and which make us human, such defining moments; memories, stories, histories, identities. Against the terror of our nothingness we have only this with which to find a balance; the truths written in our flesh and the joy of total freedom to discover them. It is a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said, “I agree”, and so began our conversations at breakfast in the last days before the Fall of Beirut, unforgettable days for this is where he set me on my life’s path.
There came a day when the barricades were overrun and our neighborhood along with it, one of our last days together. With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers in a sack of murder and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, ordering people into the streets to surrender and setting fires to burn alive in their homes anyone who refused, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes as the building we were in was set on fire, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with an apologetic shrug and another question, “Fix bayonets?”
We laughed, and he elaborated; “When all hope is lost, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” This advice I find necessary to recall from time to time, and which I recommend to you all.
Then he asked, “Will you surrender?’
To which I replied, “No.”
“Nor I,” he said, standing. “As I share with you now, pass to others at need; this is an oath I devised in 1940 from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation which friends of mine were forming. It may be the finest thing I ever stole.”
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny and fascism with Liberty and Equality; to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
To fascism and the idea that some of us are better than others by condition of our birth there can be but one reply; Never Again.
To all those who hunger to be free, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, whom Frantz Fanon named The Wretched of the Earth, this I say; you are not alone.
Let none stand alone who refuse to submit to the tyranny and terror of force and control, who speak truth to power and question, expose, mock, and challenge authority, who answer division with solidarity, control with disobedience, authorized identities, virtue, and normality with transgression, who run amok and are ungovernable.
Nor can our souls be stolen from us by either the brutal repression of fear nor the seduction of lies and illusions, we who call the enemy by his true names and stand united in the cause of our liberty, for who refuses to submit and cannot be compelled by force and control becomes Unconquered and free.
In Resistance we are all, each of us, Living Autonomous Zones. No one speaks or answers for us, nothing is beyond question, and all authority which claims us is without legitimacy or meaning.
When those who would enslave us come for one of us, let them be met with all of us; let the fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil and the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege find not a humankind broken by cruelty and state terror nor divided by hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, not hopeless and abject as products of a system of dehumanization, commodification, and falsification, not disempowered by learned helplessness nor conditioned to submit to authority and force, but a humankind united in resistance; an unconquerable and United Humankind.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of June 20 2022, Say Their Names: the Visual Iconography of the Black Lives Matter Movement for Racial Justice as Ritual Mourning; As I reflect on the visual iconography and witness of history in film and photography of our epochal reckoning of equality and racial justice, I am awed by the possibilities for civilizational transformation of this moment, by its tidal force as the people reclaim their power from governments throughout the world which have betrayed them in three successive waves of revolution; #metoo, Extinction Rebellion & Fridays for Future, and Black Lives Matter, all driving motives and informing sources which empower the global democracy revolution against fascism and tyranny. If we are to be free, we must begin by being equal.
The Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in Anderson’s The Snow Queen provides a metaphor of America’s historical memory and vision of ourselves; mirrors, cameras, things that reflect but also capture and distort. This image is shaped by the three primary forces of race, wealth, and gender which together act to subjugate, falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us. And this we must resist.
According to Henry Louis Gates Jr. as written in The Root; “In the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (1525-1866), 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. Of them, 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. Only about 388,000 were transported directly from Africa to North America”.
If we count only the known victims of racial violence since Emancipation, we have a legacy of crimes against humanity in a nation founded on the principle that all persons are created equal which reveals this to be an Original Lie; racism is not a failure of our system, but a key element of its design. Now count all the Black people who lived and died as American slaves from the first landing in 1661 to Juneteenth.
The names of the victims of racism in our nation become an infinite loop of misery and despair, a lamentation of the brokenness of the world and of the human cost of a system which uses divisions of exclusionary otherness to change some of us into things to be used for the profit of a few oligarchic families of apex predators. Ideologies of white supremacy perpetuate inequality in our society today; the wolves are still among us, even if they must disguise themselves as sheep.
Among the most terrible instruments of those who would enslave us is this erasure and silencing of Black voices, of concealment of the scope and horror of the legacy of slavery in the power asymmetries and inequalities we are heir to. We have hundreds of years of lost lives and names to reclaim, and we can not lose a single one more.
Every one of those lost lives is an Unknown Soldier in the struggle for Liberty; let us honor them with our actions as songs of survival and revolution, and make of one another living monuments to our unconquered freedom in defiance of those who would enslave us.
Of the many insightful essays written of this moment in history and its transformative and revolutionary consequences for human meaning and being, few are as eloquent as Chaédria LaBouvier’s writing in The Cut, entitled
The Afterlife of George Floyd: A Portfolio by Photographer Eli Reed American iconography of a death, history, and a Black southern homecoming; “It is a beautiful symmetry to have Eli Reed’s photographs capture and canonize this American chapter and George Floyd’s funeral. Reed is one of the best living photographers and is walking history himself; he is the first Black photographer to join Magnum Photos and is a member of Kamoinge, the Black photography collective that has in its DNA Roy DeCarava, a founding father of black-and-white fine photography.
The images are something, as they say down South, perhaps even more so because George Floyd is so present and absent from them. Where is he? It’s just as well that Floyd be in absentia, in a sense, from a photo series about him. Find George Floyd, the human, the person who unsuspectingly became a symbol, the father, the man who called out for his mother as he lay dying. Reed’s photos aren’t the expected intimacy of a funeral’s mise-en-scène with the casket and Floyd’s family — like that of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King — but it is hard to find a real reason why America would have deserved that kind of record for the ages anyway. In lieu of photographing Floyd, Reed’s camera tenderly captures the minutiae of people, in the middle of a pandemic, social collapse, and a revolution, willing themselves to bear witness.
The iconography of George Floyd’s death begins, in the modern sense, in the lynching postcards of the early 20th century. They are a perverse picture of Americana; they are souvenirs from the scenes of murders. Like the leather wallets and belts fashioned from human skin afterwards, these postcards were first and foremost evidence of many things — murder, the unhinged fantasies of White subconsciousness that have long been anchored in the idea of a Black chattel class and a belief in the unalienable right to act out that role play. That a reminder of that kind of unforgettable horror could even be necessary or even desired is an indication of what has long not been well with White America, and for quite some time; Lillian Smith, a Georgia native who framed White supremacy as a mental illness, wrote in Killers of the Dream, “These ceremonials in honor of white supremacy … slip from the conscious mind down deep into the muscles.” James Baldwin put it more explicitly: “And they have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are White.”
Video is not infinite, but it is the strongest contender in humankind’s constant quest to conquer the infinite in real time. In its cruel loopability and limitless excess, what is immortality if not an excess of everything? Everything becomes excessive on video: the length, the audience, the distribution, the distortion, the filters. America has met its match. America has found a medium capable of showing her to herself without tiring and with the matched coldness and unrelenting brutality with which America has always treated Black people.
Perhaps this helps explain why the last moments of Black life on video have found an audience and momentum to catalyze protest and people in our contemporary times. That objectivity and excess of video have distilled the core of the moment in a way few mediums can: The combination of free-range prerogative and unhinged fantasies of White people has long been at the center of these murders and subjugations. The person and the body may be Black, but they are not the subject. It’s what makes Emmett Till’s body so difficult to look at; it is not him, it is not Mamie’s child. It is the site of an imagination, deranged, it is the deadly narcissism of Whiteness’s desires as bluntly as the point can be made, and infinitely as need be. Watching Derek Chauvin kneel on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes is truly unhinged, and we are watching him enact the same fantasy that his forefathers stood proudly for in photographs when Black bodies were swinging from poplar trees. Video does not tire, and as such on a cellular level, we know America and we know that we will see another Black person die on video again. And that has absolutely nothing to do with Black people.
And so, it is in this weird moment — between the slight beginnings of a White reckoning and the evermore Black activism that has always been this country’s moral North Star — that the afterlife of George Floyd begins.
He is a child of Texas, a son of Houston’s Third Ward, Cissy Floyd’s firstborn, and as the sun set on June 9, 2020, he returned to them. Watching the procession of Floyd’s horse drawn recalled Ossie Davis’s eulogy for Malcolm X: “and we will know him then for what he was and is — a prince.” Indeed, Floyd’s homecoming was fit for a king; this has always been the visual thesis of African-American funerary, especially when someone has been stolen from us. The horse-drawn carriage, the gold casket, the choir, the Appian Way procession of the last mile to his grave; George Floyd was given a state funeral by the people, his people.
For it is in the visuals and the iconography of the homecoming — so called by enslaved people because they believed, upon death, their soul would return to Africa — that the person, the human, the humanity reemerges. The last moments of Black life under the duress of unpoliced imaginations, to paraphrase Claudia Rankine, have very little to do with Black life. And if the afterlife is a journey that is filled with abundance, beauty, and absent of all the ignorant, cruel, and dull things that make this physical one at times unbearable, it would make sense that the beginnings of the Black afterlife have absolutely nothing to do with White people. And yet, it is also never not complicated and complex; the Houston Police Department escorted his cortege on its final journey. Make of that what you will.
The visual foundation of Floyd’s afterlife incorporates themes of majesty, splendor, and nobility that are a deeply historical call-and-response to Blackness in funerary and the afterlife across time. It recalls the ancient Egyptians, New Orleans’s jazz funerals, the funeral pageantry of West African tribes, Geechee and Lowcountry funerals, the work of photographer James Van Der Zee and the promised abundance of the “upper room” in works such as Alma Thomas’s painting “Resurrection.” Floyd returned home to the very specific African-Creole corridor of East Texas and Western Louisiana is worth considering. Here, his iconography and afterlife begins in one of the most stunning ancestral regions for African-Americans — and one of the most infamously racist. A place from which the most desperate domestic refugees fled and still, to this day, flee up North for a different type of racism. Floyd himself had fled up North, to Minneapolis, like Mamie Till went up to Chicago. Further east, Emmett Till’s afterlife had its beginnings in this corridor too in the Mississippi Delta — in the Tallahatchie River, to be exact.
Where is George Floyd? How do we find him? We have no clue how and where he will settle in history, art history, how his last moments will enter a canon of filmed death. What we are looking for, beyond the momentum of canonization and movement, is him. Those intimate, quotidian, and mundane things which begrudgingly and solemnly construct a life and one’s work in it. Who will replace his hello to the people who are used to seeing him every day? If he is that person in the neighborhood who takes out the trash for the elderly women who live alone on the block, who will take his place? Who will lead George Floyd’s Bible studies or be the gentle giant in the barbershop, on the block, and at the corner store? How do a community and a family replace what is irreplaceable? Reed’s photographs began looking for these unanswerable questions.
His images recall the tenderness and difficulty of a watercolor portrait. A watercolor portrait is a small miracle; a painter must work quickly, with sustained velocity and controlled chaos, to bend the fluidity of water and the subject’s essence to reveal something luminous, telling, and coherent. Maybe it is the same mastery of application at work here; Reed’s camera captures the uncapturable, what it meant to be in the sticky humidity of that Houston evening that smelled like grief, mosquito repellent, candle wax, and cedar wood. For those not there, Reed’s work acts as a bridge to translate the mourning, the prayer circles, the enormous and quotidian worries of those there — the traffic afterwards, if the chicken left in the sink had fully thawed by the time they got home, if something calamitous would happen on the way back, what would happen now to George’s family, now that he was in the ground and the real shattering, breaking, and healing (maybe) begins. The luminosity of the human experience is here in the artist’s offering to George Floyd, a lion in the winter of his years who has captured wars at home and abroad, still working, this time in the looming discontent of Juneteenth, a plague, and the knocking knees of an empire in collapse. Somewhere in there is a radical love, a belief that George is still owed more, that Black people are deserving of more and that they must have it, and they must have it yesterday, today, tomorrow, and forever. Like watercolors, the fervency of this simple truth is hard to capture. It is that love for, and of, and by Black people at the very root of it all which propels the people to the street, prepared to die if it should come down to it. And it is because, like Ossie Davis said of Malcolm, they love us so.
It is, as they say down South, truly something.”
How police killings are kept hidden: ‘We don’t know how many George Floyds there are’
‘The world has never been the same’: George Floyd’s uncle on three years of heartbreak and fighting for justice
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/06/george-floyd-uncle-interview
His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice,
Robert Samuels, Toluse Olorunnipa
Authorized big-screen biopic of George Floyd in the works
https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/may/22/george-floyd-movie-biopic?CMP=share_btn_url
What would George Floyd’s life have looked like without the crushing weight of racism?
New York to pay $13.7m to George Floyd protesters arrested or beaten by police
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/20/new-york-nypd-george-floyd-protests-2020
US cities to pay record $80m to people injured in 2020 racial justice protests
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/25/us-cities-settlement-protesters-blm-racial-justice
Biden promised to reform the police. Why has so little progress been made
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/26/biden-review-police-criminal-justice-reform-promises
The stifling of protest around the world paves the road for authoritarian rule
One year on, how George Floyd’s murder has changed the world
This article is more than 3 years old
The killing of Floyd by a white officer reflected a common history of violence against Black people that united protesters in a renewed global movement
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/22/george-floyd-murder-change-across-world-blm
US policing is far less about fighting crime than controlling the poo
The George Floyd verdict would not have happened without months of protest
There’s hope for racial justice in America. But it comes from the people – not the courts
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/22/derek-chauvin-verdict-police-race-us
https://www.thecut.com/2020/06/photographs-of-george-floyds-funeral-by-eli-reed.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/22/george-floyd-murder-change-across-world-blm
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/22/us/ronald-greene-louisiana-video-saturday/index.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-underground-railroad-barry-jenkins_n_60a27281e4b090924806181a
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/23/george-floyd-minneapolis-anniversary-events
Black Lives Matter and Manuals of Action, a reading list
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Asha Bandele, Angela Y. Davis (Foreword)
Say Their Names: How Black Lives Came to Matter in America, Curtis Bunn,
Michael H. Cottman, Patrice Gaines, Nick Charles, Keith Harriston
They Can’t Kill Us All: The Story of Black Lives Matter, Wesley Lowery
How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi
How We Fight White Supremacy, Akiba Solomon & Kenrya Rankin (Editors)
Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, Bloom & Martin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15722514-black-against-empire?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_89
The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, Jesmyn Ward
(Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28505023-the-fire-this-time?ref=rae_2
Torch of Liberty 
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