Why structural racism will need more than awareness to be undone

We did not need to see George Floyd’s murder. In an ideal world, he wouldn’t have been killed at all. Yet, here we are again, gripped by the now all-too familiar spectacle of a black body’s destruction. In a powerful piece by American writer and academic Zoé Samudzi about the contemporary function of the white witness, and the misguided belief that passive viewership can translate into structural justice, she references Ahmaud Arbery’s murder in South Georgia in February—which only became public knowledge in May—to state what we already know: “The pattern of learning a new hashtagged name and face and collectively petitioning for some semblance of punitive justice is heartbreakingly banal and psychologically depleting.”

A global awareness of racism and of anti-blackness has consistently failed to undo racism’s structural manifestations because white privilege and white supremacy are two sides of the same coin. White supremacy is invoked in defence of white privilege, the murderers act on behalf of what they believe to be the white ‘race’—which is why white silence in this context is complicity. The aftermath of Floyd’s death took me back to July 2016, when I arrived in Atlanta, Georgia for a month-long fellowship exploring race, civil rights and immigration. On the 5 July, the day of my arrival, 37-year-old Alton Sterling was murdered by police in Baton Rouge. A day later, 32-year-old Philando Castille met his death at the hands of police in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. I was promptly reminded why the fellowship was so expedient all these years after the civil rights movement.

Over the next three days of protest,  I felt—borrowing the words of Martiniquais poet Aime Cesaire—a cosmic anger, much like we feel now. Decisive action was necessary now that we had all seen what we know well: in an anti-black world, black life is cheap and black death unmournable. I learnt a lot on those Atlanta streets. Importantly, I experienced first-hand how shortness of breath is inextricably tied to being racialised as black. We choked on teargas, gasped at the sight of the national guard pulling in and heaved with exasperation after days of chanting. It was always the air. Running. Out.

I was not born black. In Nairobi, Kenya, where I was born, one is not necessarily black at birth, one just is. First, a baby. Then, a toddler, a child, a teenager. Intermittently, one performs religion, ethnicity, gender, class or nationality when it fits the occasion. At 19—and in subsequent years of living in Germany—I became an Ausländer. I am still becoming African: learning the histories and languages that formal education did not teach me, and reconciling with the realisation that the images that ‘Africa’ conjures have nothing to do with the place I grew up in. In Atlanta, I joined the protest because regardless of where I was from, it still could have been me. This is why Black Lives Matter’s claim that it is a global movement for black lives hits differently for me because, in case we forget that these things are arbitrary social constructs, I am a recent arrival to blackness. The colour of my skin—and James Baldwin contended this by saying “I am not your Negro” —is not the reason for my blackness, whiteness is. 

Because we have perfected a twisted voyeurism towards the most fatal forms of police violence in the US, racist police brutality happening under our noses surprises only those of us who have chosen to ignore it. Black people are, and I am paraphrasing black-diasporas scholar Vanessa Thompson here, no longer the wretched, but the policed-of-the-earth. Globally, when the police can be said to be doing their job properly, black people and people of colour will be disproportionately brutalised and over-policed. For their part, white and lighter-skinned people’s communities are under-policed. This is true in South Africa, Germany, China, Brazil, US, to name but a few. In Kenya, fatal violence at the hands of the police is also prevalent—the latest killing was as recent as 1 June. Across the globe, security is produced through conditions of social and physical un-breathing (metaphorically ‘I can’t breathe’) where policing assumes the role of an institutionalised global white gaze. Systems of policing affirm whiteness even in its physical absence; they are the go-betweens between white supremacy and the racialised. 

Even though most of us here in Germany are finally awakening to the global dangers of being black, I do not feel safe because those hazards—even by UN standards—are chronically underestimated in this country. Names like Ourry Jalloh, Christy Schwundek or N’deye Mariame Sarr among many others do not ring a bell here like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tony McDade or Breonna Taylor rightfully do in the US and beyond. In 2001, police shot Sarr when they were called to resolve a domestic dispute in Aschaffenburg, Bavaria. Jalloh was burnt to death in a Dessau police cell in 2005. Schwundek was shot by police in Frankfurt’s unemployment office in 2011.

All of these deaths were a result of racial profiling, which although illegal, is widespread in many German states, including Berlin. For survivors, the Campaign for Victims of Racist Police Violence chronicles across a 300-page report two decades-worth of such cases in Berlin alone. Racial profiling does not end when the police leave, it is dispersed into black peoples lives long-term. However—and this is the structural injustice here—there is a visceral futility to recounting these cases. Always, over and above the violent, racist incidents themselves, the burden is always on us, the policed-of-the-earth, to provide evidence. Ultimately, black people’s feelings towards racism, anti-blackness and police violence have not changed for as long as we have endured it. The question is, have yours? To paraphrase British-American writer and photographer Taiye Selasi, explore how it makes you feel to know that the police believe it their duty to protect your child, while they casually profile and fatally destroy the body—and spirit—of mine.

Eric Otieno is a scholar, writer and facilitator interested in the intersections between social justice, postcolonial politics, the global ‘order’ and contemporary art and culture. He is a doctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Development and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kassel, Germany.