Five Years Later

The Star Tribune's coverage of five years since the police murder of George Floyd is, as I expected, a mixed bag with a bit too much centrist suburban b.s.

The poem they commissioned by the Minneapolis poet laureate, Junauda Petrus, was wonderful (gift link). The multi-page timeline of the week that followed, with quotes from various people (reproduced online here... gift link) is a fair representation and worth reading, though of course it omits major aspects that stick in my mind. 

I looked back at my own blog from those days. As happens too often, I clearly was not able to write about what was happening as it was happening. At the time, I was also dealing with another major life upheaval related to the covid pandemic, so as my city was on fire, I had to carry on to keep some other things from falling apart. 

I wrote about the killing first, briefly, on Tuesday, the day after it happened. On Wednesday, as police were firing "less lethal" rounds at the crowd outside Minneapolis's Third Precinct, I wrote about being a "race traitor." On Thursday, when the precinct and other buildings there and in Saint Paul were on fire, I wrote a short post called Here in the Twin Cities, May 28. On Friday, just a quote from my then-City Council member. On Saturday, after both Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore in Minneapolis and a Saint Paul locally owned pharmacy had been burned (and many other local businesses and institutions), and the National Guard was on our streets... I couldn't post about any of it anymore, and put up this.

The Black folks — like local poet Michael Kleber-Diggs in our neighborhood paper the Park Bugle (pdf, page 5) or University of Michigan Professor Ebony Thomas — who predicted at the time that white backlash would happen in response to the idea of Black lives mattering… have proven all too correct. 

And here we are, with millions of people denying George Floyd died from Derek Chauvin's actions, just like they deny many other facts.