Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa are black Washington Post journalists who wrote a book entitled “His Name is George Floyd.” They obsessively blame white people for all of black people’s problems, and apparently make a good living doing it.
Robert Samuels
Toluse Olorunnipa
If black people had any sense at all, they would view these men as parasites, feeding off the problems of black people for a profit.
Samuels Olorunnipa writes for The Guardian:
The murder of George Floyd two years ago prompted a global awakening about the pervasiveness of racism, as millions of people, from Toronto to Tokyo to Tottenham, joined together to take to the streets in the summer of 2020.
After nearly two years of reporting on Floyd’s life and legacy, and writing a book, His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice, we are often asked if anything has actually changed since his murder.
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For a moment at least, it seemed that people of all political stripes were willing to acknowledge the reality that racism continued to play a major role in society and that it remained a force that needed to be proactively eliminated. And despite the resistance that ultimately emerged, there have been some lasting changes from the initial burst of activism sparked by Floyd’s death.
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But it did not take long for momentum to be lost. While the summer of 2020 showed record high support for the Black Lives Matter movement, as the memory of Floyd’s death faded, so, too, did the willingness to grapple with the injustice that he faced both in life and as he died. By September 2020, a study from the Pew Research Center found that support for the Black Lives Matter movement had decreased from 67% to 55% overall, where it would remain into the following year. The fascination with the phrase appeared to be a ceremonial, summertime fling. The US federal police reform bill that was to bear Floyd’s name fell victim to partisan politics and was never passed.
In 2022, a new counterattack has emerged against diversity or even discussing the concept of systemic racism. Today, rightwing politicians in the US are winning elections by promising to outlaw the teaching of “critical race theory” in schools, and books about racism are being banned in some communities. The moves reflect a reactionary agitation about whether the amplified focus on race has gone too far.
Remembering Floyd’s story hopefully reminds us what can happen to an individual when a society ignores the residue of historically racist policies, while teaching us about having persistence in the face of challenges.
“Sis, I don’t want to rule the world,” a 13-year-old Floyd told his older sister, Zsa Zsa, in a scene we report in the book. “I don’t want to run the world. I just want to touch the world.”
As we researched Floyd’s life, conducting more than 400 interviews to craft a portrait of his unique American experience, it was easy to envision a much different outcome for him, had his journey not so often run headlong into the brutal force of institutional racism.
Instead of being born impoverished, Floyd could have come into the world as a wealthy scion of an industrious great-great-grandfather, if racism had not stripped his hardworking ancestors of their landholdings in North Carolina at the turn of the 20th century. He could have been able to pursue his second-grade dream of ascending to the supreme court, if underfunded public schools and dilapidated public housing had not defined his adolescence in a segregated slum. His lyricism and poetic nature could have elevated him to prominence in the world of arts, if his struggles with addiction and mental illness had been met with treatment rather than the unforgiving cruelty of the US’s mass incarceration complex. His less ambitious goals later in life – to become a truck driver or to open a small restaurant and provide jobs for the downtrodden – could have been achievable if Derek Chauvin had not ignored his pleas for mercy on that fateful day two years ago.
This is a pattern of claiming that black people are not responsible for their own behavior.
No white man forced George Floyd to become a drug addict. No white man forced him to use a counterfeit bill. No white man forced him to resist arrest after committing a felony.
Here’s a grim reality check: black people were a lot healthier and better off when there actually was some degree of “racism” in America. They had healthy, happy families under slavery, they had healthy, happy families under Jim Crow.
The definition of “racism” is shifty and we don’t really understand what it even means at this point, but if we just define “racism” as “racial discrimination,” then racism against blacks literally does not exist in modern America. In fact, fundamental values embedded in the Constitution surrounding a right to free association have been abandoned in order to ensure that private individuals are banned from discriminating against blacks.
The only people who are racially discriminated against are whites and Asians – both groups being systematically discriminated against by the government through affirmative action laws.
This lack of discrimination has done absolutely nothing to aid the situation of black people. Black people have never been worse off. They are worse off now than they were before the George Floyd riots, because drug dealers and murderers are just allowed to run completely wild in their neighborhoods.
All of this gibberish about blaming white people serves precisely no purpose whatsoever. None of it helps black people, and there isn’t even a theoretical way that it could help black people. It’s just the same thing as an individual’s life: who has ever improved their station by blaming other people for their problems?
George Floyd’s life would have went much better if he’d chosen not to be a career criminal and a drug addict.