The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the
nationwide protests it triggered, and Donald Trump’s reaction have prompted
comment and editorials around the globe.
In the Sydney Morning Herald, columnist Tom Swizer sees an
all too familiar pattern.
“The mayhem follows a depressing pattern in American history.
The record of state failures to protect blacks and others against police
brutality is all too full. Ditto the looting and arson, killings and general
eruption of racial violence in many American cities when injustices occur.”
An editorial Le Monde paints a similar picture of structural
racism and police brutality by police and others against black Americans.
“George Floyd and Eric Garner are not isolated victims. The
list is too long to give here of these black American men of all ages, who are
too often victims of encounters with the police that go turn out badly; of the
trigger happy in a country where firearms are routinely carried as an
accessory, or just plain racism.
“Too many mothers in the African American community must
teach their sons from an early adolescence how to behave on the street so as
not to arouse suspicion and not to be in turn the target of blunders or
mistakes. Too many black joggers in big cities know that covering their heads
with the hood of their sweatshirts or ignoring, because they have headphones on
their ears, an audible warning to stop running exposes their lives to danger.”
El Periódico in Barcelona also points to a history of endemic
racism in the US.
“The truth is that what happened in Minneapolis, recorded on
video and viewed worldwide through social networks, is just the latest proof
that the racism epidemic is far from being controlled, and that the two Barack
Obama administrations did nothing to cauterize any wounds. On the contrary,
they fueled the desire for revenge in many communities, with a deeply rooted
racist culture, which saw its time come in November 2016 with the victory of a
far-right Republican candidate.”
Many commentators are doubtful that Trump as the skills or
even political capital to emerge as a healer. In an analysis, Edward Keenan,
Washington bureau chief of the Toronto Star, is pessimistic that even if the
president did make a speech, as some of his allies have been urging, there is
nothing he could say to defuse the situation.
“Even if Trump were inclined to try to heal the nation with
some kind of address, as some have called for him to do, it is hard to imagine
anything he could say that would de-escalate the situation rather than be read
as a provocation by the protesters.
“There is no obvious end point to the unfolding crisis. After
months of the coronavirus and days of civil unrest, Americans are bracing themselves
for more chaos in the days and weeks ahead.”
The Times of London, in its leader on Monday, draws a similar
conclusion pointing to Trump’s incendiary style:
“2020 comes with its own complications, and one of them is in
the White House. On Friday, after first having called Floyd’s death ‘shocking’,
President Trump took to Twitter to threaten a military response against ‘thugs’
in Minneapolis and quipped: ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts.’ In
a remarkable first, the social media network flagged the tweet as ‘glorifying
violence’.
“After demonstrations spread to the White House, the
president threatened any protester breaching barriers with ‘the most vicious
dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen’ and appeared to be calling
for his own supporters to rally to meet them. Politically, identifying enemies
puts Mr Trump into his comfort zone. Rather than pouring oil on troubled
waters, he has opted for petrol.”
Related: 'Mr President, don't go hide': China goads US over
George Floyd protests
Not all commentators, however, have come to the issue
entirely lacking an agenda, not least in China, which has been locked in a
fractious war of words with Washington over coronavirus and other issues.
The Global Times – under the headline “George Floyd murder
exposes rotten racism in the US” – is predictably scathing.
“In a year of elections that are particularly important for
Trump, votes from the black community do not matter that much. After all, Trump
won just 8% of African American voters four years ago. Black voters are always
the base of the Democratic party. So as protests escalate across the country,
Trump played the same old political games by shaming Minneapolis’ Democrat
mayor and retweeting an account urging Minnesotans to vote Democrats out of
office. As the pandemic gets severe, the economic card doesn’t work anymore for
Trump. Passing the buck is his trump card.”
South Africa’s Mail and Guardian meanwhile has Ifrah Udgoon,
a US Somali immigrant, writing about her fears for her black son.
“Black mothers have much to fear when it comes to their
children. American soil is saturated with the blood of black people: slavery,
Jim Crow, mass incarceration and the war on drugs, and police brutality have
ensured that black people know pain and loss intimately…
“We don’t see just a man in a single moment when we look at
George Floyd. We see America’s entire racial history culminating into that one
moment.”
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