Love Identifies; Evil Dehumanizes

  I’ve been struggling to wrap my heart and mind around what happened to George Floyd.  So far I’ve found my thoughts centering around four points: victim shaming, social media, systemic evil, and the responses of two groups to Floyd’s murder.

            Let’s jump right in with victim shaming.  Victim shaming is an attempt to try to relieve the conscience by finding fault with the victim.  If you can find some wrongdoing on the part of the victim, your moral universe can return to equilibrium because what happened makes sense.  It is self-serving in this way and it dehumanizes.

            Victim shaming implies that we need to build a case for why a human deserves humane treatment.  Why is it that we apparently need to build a case for George Floyd deserving to breathe?  I would be fascinated to hear someone argue the specifics of exactly how bad someone must be to deserve almost nine minutes of a knee on the neck.  

            We shame the victim to distance ourselves from the victim.  It gives us an assurance that we will never be treated as the victim was treated.  We don’t need to identify ourselves with the victim because he’s different from us.

            Now it shouldn’t matter whether the victim is like us or not, but apparently it does.  That’s our problem and we need to address it.  I need to address it because I was cut to the heart about this injustice when I saw the following picture and read the testimony.

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 “Man, George Floyd was a person of peace sent from the Lord that helped the gospel go forward in a place that I never lived in. His hospitality led to so many people coming to know Jesus for themselves. He and other OGs gave us passes in neighborhoods I had no business being in. I need to process and pray before I’m able to respond. Maranatha. #icantbreathe” P.T. Ngwolo

            Upon seeing that picture and reading that testimony, I recognized that I hadn’t truly identified myself with George Floyd.  Apparently I needed to see that he identified with me as an evangelical before I fully identified myself with him.  That’s wrong and that’s on me.

            Let’s move on to our second point: the nature of social media in this moment in history.  The bulk of these conversations about George Floyd have been happening online.  This means that they are far more blunt than they would be in person.  People tend to say online what they would never say in person.  That has all sorts of problems, but it also opens the door to possibilities.  I’m sure there have been times that I have been dead wrong but polite conversation didn’t encourage the other person to speak the truth.  Perhaps this moment on social media will give people ears to hear.  In general though very few people go on Facebook or Twitter to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger and some people never do.  This is one of the reasons I put these thoughts on this website rather than directly on social media.

            The nature of social media matters particularly for this killing because it happened during the covid-19 pandemic which has taken on a life of its own online.  Throughout this pandemic, and especially as it has gone on, there have been any number of posts about oppressive restrictions, the abuse of power on the part of the government, and the inability to make a livelihood due to these restrictions.  Some of these are merely inflammatory, but many deserve attention.

            That being said, I would be fascinated to see a study on the overlap between people posting about oppressive restrictions, the abuse of power, and inability to make a livelihood due to covid-19 and the people posting on the oppressive restrictions, abuse of power, and denial of life on display in the case of George Floyd.  Are the same people posting their same outrage in both situations?

          One interpretation of a lack of overlap would say, “I’m only sufficiently outraged enough to post about oppressive restrictions and the abuse of power and a threat to livelihood if they infringe upon me.”  Now that’s only one interpretation involving an argument from silence.  However, it is human nature.  I’m naturally angered by what infringes upon me.  I must choose to be angered by what infringes upon others.

            Let’s move to our third point which is a consideration of consider good cops and systemic evil.  There are any number of officers condemning and lamenting the tragedy of what happened to George Floyd.  The majority of the officers I’ve known personally seem to be upright men and women.  For such officers, what happened to George Floyd brings its own sorrow. It also makes a hard job harder.  I heard from an African American woman who serves as a police officer.  She hungers and thirsts for righteousness for George Floyd and she hungers and thirsts for righteousness enough to put on the uniform.  We don’t want to paint all police officers with the brush appropriate to the actions of a few.  In other words, we don’t want to be prejudiced against individuals.

            That being said we can’t simply write this off as a case of a few bad apples.  Watching that video of Floyd’s death it’s hard to deny that there is a systemic problem.  You see the systemic problem on display.  No one with the power to intervene in that situation did intervene in that situation.  The only recourse civilians would have had would be to call the cops on the cops.  It’s not hard to understand why they didn’t.  That’s a systematic problem.

             I have no idea how far this systemic problem goes within the Minneapolis Police Department.  I have no idea how widespread it is across police departments in Minnesota, the midwest, or the nation.  It stands to reason that there are any number of different variables at play.  Different departments are doubtlessly quite different.  Different regions of the country are doubtlessly quite different.  That said, everyone must avoid the temptation to limit this problem to “somewhere out there.”  We do that to calm our own fears.  There are factors that led to the systemic problem on display in this video.  These factors are not entirely alien from our communities or from the human heart.

            Fourth and finally, I want to think about the response to Floyd’s death in terms of a prayer meeting and the riots.  After Floyd’s death, I saw a Facebook post by a friend of his who is a pastor in Houston.  I wanted to do something in response to Floyd’s death that required something of me.  This pastor let me know that members of their church were gathering for a zoom prayer meeting that evening and he was gracious enough to let me join.

            These were born again hearts pouring out their hearts to God—anger, longing, sorrow, a desire for repentance on the part of the officers, pleading for patience and self-control to respond as Jesus would have them respond.  The Psalms were on display - “how long O Lord?”  The thoughts and prayers were righteous.  These church members wanted to see people come to know Jesus through Big Floyd’s death.

            This is one response and it isn’t explainable other than by the Spirit of God.  Now let’s turn to the rioting and looting which is actually easier to explain.  What follows is not an excuse but an explanation.  I find that distinction helpful when it comes to sin and wrongdoing.  I can understand why Peter betrayed Jesus without excusing it.  I can understand why David forced himself upon Bathsheba without excusing it.  I can understand why these people are looting and rioting without excusing it.  I must try to understand it; if I don’t, I am dehumanizing these people and there is certainly more than enough of that occurring online right now.

            I can understand this response because I responded in a similar way this past week on an individual scale.  This Thursday I was beyond frustrated with my children who wouldn’t listen to me.  When I went out to the garage to put some items away, I banged my head on some poles that were sticking out of a shelf.  I pulled one down to crack it over my knee.  Now that’s a senseless response.  That pole did nothing to me.  I walked into it.  My frustrations had been growing throughout the day and this was simply the breaking point.

            You can take these same dynamics and apply them to many of the protestors in Minneapolis.  They are frustrated because it certainly seems as if no one is listening.  They suffer an injury like the injustice of Big Floyd’s death, and they respond in a way that to the outside certainly seems senseless.  That’s not all that different from what I saw in myself. I’m sure there are dozens of other factors, as well as more nefarious reasons that many are rioting and looting, but that is one of my attempts to begin to understand it; again, not excuse it but understand it.

            Both the group praying and the rioters are doing something with their anger.  One is productive and one is destructive.  However, I think the prayer meeting is the harder one to understand. It requires the Spirit of God to understand. You can understand the prayer meeting if you have the power of the Spirit.  You can understand but not excuse the rioters by way of identification.

           I don’t claim to understand much of this, but I do think I have the responsibility to understand what I can understand about this injustice.  I do think I have the responsibility to do what’s appropriate in light of what happened.  I think we all do.