George Floyd's Legacy
Hey, suckers: Stop whining, stop criming, stop begging
Five years to the day that George Floyd died in Minneapolis after resisting arrest, he and Martin Luther King, Jr. finally crossed paths in the Great Hereafter.
King looked Floyd up and down, then sadly delivered his verdict: “So you The Man now.”
Yes, this is who black folk — and their white flacks — now esteem. A fentanyl-addicted thug who resisted arrest.
The mainstream media couldn’t let the fifth anniversary of Floyd’s death pass without a chance to once again genuflect to Floyd.
The Portland Mercury knocked itself out with both online coverage and a special 30-page print edition, “BlackOut: A Five-Year Retrospective on Portland’s Racial Justice Movement,” written and curated by black Portlanders.
In the introduction, Donovan Scribes writes that the dozen essays and interviews “reflect on one of the most monumental moments in human history.”
A 46-year-old black man with a violent criminal history, high on fentanyl, used a counterfeit $20 bill to buy a pack of cigarettes from a store in Minneapolis. A clerk followed him to his Mercedes and asked him to return the cigarettes. He refused. The clerk called police.
Had Floyd returned the cigarettes or cooperated with police, the matter could have ended there. But he put up a fight. Sgt. Derek Chauvin, struggling with Floyd and surrounded by angry onlookers, ended up kneeling on Floyd’s neck and killing him.
This is what passes for one of the most monumental moments in human history?
“This issue is about five Black fingers clenched in the air…,” Scribes says. “This issue is about flesh, bone, and soul.”
The first fist in the air is from Devin Boss, lamenting the loss of the Portland neighborhood he grew up in that was filled with mothers, aunties and neighbors — “all of whom were deputized ass-whoopers.”
It sounds a lot like that famous village Hillary Clinton used to talk about.
What happened to those villages? Drugs, the sexual revolution, family breakups, crime.
Ass-whooping has its uses, but Boss and the other writers in “BlackOut” have little use for law enforcement.
Another fist in the air is from Lakayana Drury, a former high school teacher and now founder and executive director of Word is Bond, a nonprofit that focuses on helping young black men. (Portland Dissent has written about Lakayana Drury’s group here.)
His essay is the most disappointing, since it has some well-crafted lines (Drury is a poet), but it is littered with racist stereotypes. He takes two young black males to Zupan’s, “the upscale white folks supermarket. … The fact that Zupan’s is a different world for Black youths is the same reason why there are no longer any department stores in Lloyd Center Mall.”
Drury’s essay is layered in racist excuses. One of the young black males with him at Zupan’s has been expelled from school. Drury doesn’t ask why, he just writes: “Stop putting youth in handcuffs.”
And if they assault, steal, shoot — then what?
The two young black males he is with “are headed down paths synonymous with jail cells and caskets,” Drury writes.
Are they unable to control their behavior? It appears so.
In Christopher Lambert’s essay, he makes it sound like he had no choice.
“I was 18 when I picked up that gun. I remember the weight of it, the false sense of power it gave me. I wasn’t firing bullets, I was firing exclamation points. Because I was done talking. I wanted respect.”
Exclamation points don’t kill. Lambert was sentenced to 20 years in prison for a crime he won’t detail, a victim he will not name. Prison gave him a chance to take courses through the University of Oregon, and thanks to former Gov. Kate Brown, Lambert received a commutation and was released early.
What about his victim? Was he perhaps a young black male, living in circumstances not much better than Lambert’s? Did he have a name?
A few pages over from Lambert’s essay is an interview with Teressa Raiford of Don’t Shoot Portland. One of her signature chants at protests against officer-involved shootings is “Say his name,” demanding the crowd shout the name of the person who was shot.
Apparently in this world, that special respect is only accorded blacks who have been shot by police — not by other blacks.
In Raiford’s interview, she recalls the infamous “possum incident” in 1981. In her telling, “seven police officers” came to her grandmother’s restaurant, the Burger Barn, and dumped some dead possums in front. Raiford said her grandpa was a good friend of then-Police Commissioner Charles Jordan, who was black. He put two cops on leave, she said, and police protested. (The Burger Barn owners sued and received $64,000.)
For all the publicity about the possum incident, what is rarely said — and isn’t mentioned here — is that the Burger Barn was a place black parents warned their sons and daughters about, especially daughters. Stay away from the Burger Barn.
Raiford segues from dead possums to a cousin who was killed and then a nephew who was killed. After working for a CPA, she later noticed how programs that were created to fight violence were mostly a means to raise money.
When Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, Raiford’s group Don’t Shoot Portland became politically active.
There is no mention that Brown, 18, punched Officer Darren Wilson and tried to grab his gun. There is no acknowledgement that then-President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice did not support bringing civil rights charges against Wilson.
The overall theme of the essays in “BlackOut” is that black people are never at fault, and nothing ever changes. Could the two possibly be related?
In her essay, Sharon Gary-Smith, former president of the Portland NAACP, takes a swipe at former Portland Police Chief Danielle Outlaw, a black woman, “who proved to be a more traditional tough-on-crime accomplice.”
Rukaiyah Adams, the CEO of the 1803 Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to rebuilding the historically black community in North and Northeast Portland, drops a glaring error in her piece.
She recalls the day “when Rodney King was murdered.” King was not murdered. He was beaten by Los Angeles police in 1991 after a high-speed pursuit and received a $3.8 million settlement. He died 21 years later after drowning in his backyard pool.
Then there’s Mac Smiff, a journalist and activist.
“If we can stop calling the cops on each other, and start modeling what it means to live in community, then we can start to defund the public services that we don’t want,” he writes, pushing for the abolition of police.
Perhaps the most startling omission is in the essays by Justice Rajee, director of Reimagine Oregon, and Nkenge Harmon Johnson, of Portland’s Urban League, who helped develop a list of demands as part of Reimagine Oregon — a state project that responded to the Floyd riots by offering $62 million to various black-led organizations.
Nowhere in Rajee’s or Harmon Johnson’s essays is there a mention of that $62 million.
Among the demands made by Reimagine Oregon five years ago: Better housing (for blacks); better schools (for blacks); no more school expulsions; free public transit; less punishment for black criminals; forgive rent for renters affected by COVID (since blacks tend to be renters); increase salaries for frontline workers in social service agencies that have a track record of consistently serving black families; stop all homeless sweeps and defund police.
During the press conference and launch of Reimagine Oregon, Harmon Johnson bordered on belligerent when she was asked about the property damage rioters were doing to businesses.
“Pardon me if I refuse to discuss graffiti on the side of buildings. You’ll forgive me if I refuse to engage in discussions about plate glass windows…,” she snapped.
She told journalists to focus on “the fact that this is about lives and the right of people to be free. After I get free, I will discuss graffiti.”
In “BlackOut,” Harmon Johnson complains that the national media framed the Portland protests as “lawless.” She complains about the constant apologizing by whites.
“In line at the grocery store? Some woman wants to apologize for the systemic racism you face every day. Grabbing a latte? The barista just wants to let you know they took a comparative race and gender course, and they are so, so, so sorry things are the way they are.”
None of the black Portlanders writing in the five-year retrospective of Portland’s racial justice protests appear to have noticed any improvements.
They seem to occupy a provincial world. Do these black Portlanders ever peruse the world at large and notice how truly diverse it really is.
The same day that America’s media were paying its respects to the anniversary of George Floyd, The New York Times ran a story about the 60th anniversary of a famous photo of Muhammad Ali knocking down Sonny Liston. You’ve probably seen the picture. Ali glares down at Liston and yells, “Get up and fight, sucker!”
Later in Ali’s career he fought for the heavyweight title against George Foreman in the African nation of Zaire. Ali won the match, and when he returned to the U.S., a reporter asked him “Champ, what did you think of Africa?"
Ali replied, "Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!”
He spoke an uncomfortable truth that many black Americans and their flacks in the media choose to ignore.
“Ali recognizes that for all the horror of slavery, it was the transmission belt that brought Africans into the orbit of Western freedom,” explained author Dinesh D’Souza. “The slaves were not better off—the boat Ali refers to brought the slaves through a horrific Middle Passage to a life of painful servitude—yet their descendants today, even if they won't admit it, are better off. Ali was honest enough to admit it.“
What would Ali make of these black Portlanders with their fists — raised in the air.
I used to think the OJ Simpson case represented the nadir of race relations in the post-70s America.
Again, I was wrong, it was George Floyd and what came after in 2020, but not for the "usual reasons." As Fitzsimmons has set out here and before, the death of an habitual criminal and thug, who the Medical Examiner says died of cardiac arrest complicated by fentanyl use, has become a perverse figure of admiration.
Floyd, who ALWAYS told the cops "I can't breathe! usually before hands were even placed on him, who was supposedly destitute, but driving a Mercedes Benz SUV, and whose family was rewarded with almost $30 million, more than has been awarded brave young doctors with families who died at the hands of a wealthy drunk driver.
The beast has come round at last, and for many people these are the end times.
Pam says what no one else in our cowed, intimidated media would touch with a barge-pole.
I'll never forget visiting my kid in St Johns during the Floyd protest years--a sound a block away of someone ranting over a loudspeaker; I walked over and there they were: a young black woman in the back of a pickup leading an almost 100-percent white parade, shuffling along with anti-police placards, smug expressions, chants on command...pathetic. What did they accomplish, beyond self-abasement?
This is now the norm in Portland: white guilt as a moneymaker and mass psychological therapy. Mobilizing the transfer of power and money--to what end? Can anyone seriously maintain that the city and its black minority are in any way better off, despite the benefits, deck-stacking, racist programs, $-millions dumped into hustler-nonprofits over the past five years? On any rational cost-benefit measure, it's been an utter disaster.