On George Floyd

I haven't written anything here about George Floyd's murder. I still don't have a cogent response but here's what I've been mulling over:

• America has a problem when year after year the very institution put in place to serve folks in our communities ends up killing and harassing them and even goes out of its way to target Black people in those communities.
• Like everything in America today the response to Floyd's murder has become politicized. We all need to make the effort to move past our collective politics and biases and grapple with what changes need to be made both personally and collectively.

I've collected three links that have stuck with me over the last handful of weeks.

Unsurprisingly Dave Chappelle's 8:46 special on George Floyd is insightful, gripping, and poignant.

Around the 5:40 mark he breaks down the problem:

What are you signifying — that you can kneel on a man’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds and feel like you wouldn’t get the wrath of God? That’s what is happening right now. It’s not for a single cop. It’s for all of it. Fucking all of it.

Elsewhere, McSweeney's, in typical fashion, cast the issue in a new light:

This initiative, also known as Skynet, was created by Cyberdyne Systems for the Department of Defense as a way to keep Americans safe. Critics have said that spending half of our country’s GDP on developing an army of state-of-the-art cyborgs with advanced weapons systems and an AI specifically trained to neutralize threats was a bad idea. And while the recent killings might seem to confirm that, we feel that, despite a few stumbles here and there, this program has still been an overwhelming success.

Finally, Chris Rock has this great segment about "bad apples".