Philonise Floyd, speaking after his brother George’s murderer was found guilty by a jury, called Emmett Till “the first George Floyd.” Members of Till’s family, including his cousin Deborah Watts and her daughter — who attended Floyd’s memorial service — were reportedly on hand to support the Floyd family as they awaited a verdict for George’s killer that Emmett’s never received. Floyd also said the name of Daunte Wright, noting that history is present, justice is still not done, and we still have to demand that the system offer something approximating accountability.
“He should still be here,” Floyd said of Wright. “We have to always understand that we have to march. We will have to do this for life.”
It's not a coincidence that Wright, a Black 20-year-old who was killed by a Minnesota police officer, was once a student of a woman who dated George Floyd, who was also killed by a Minnesota police officer. Similarly, do not chalk up to inexplicable chance that a Black Army lieutenant whom police held at gunpoint and roughed up in December, Caron Nazario, was a relative of Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a cop in 2014. And don’t consider it a fluke that the mother of Fred Hampton, killed at age 21 by state-backed police executioners in 1969, had babysat Emmett Till, a Black child lynched in 1955.
Whether it’s state agents or self-deputized vigilantes, there are no isolated incidents where white American violence against Black folks is concerned, and the historical ubiquity of white terror is evidenced by the devastation and loss it has wreaked in Black families otherwise separated by time and distance. A staggering number of Black American family trees have branches that have been abruptly severed by brutal white terror—a forest of Black lives splintered by white American violence. Nearly every Black person in America knows the danger of weaponized whiteness intimately, through personal experience or its impact on friends and relatives, in the form of years stolen, trauma inflicted, lives taken.
There are, consequently, so many more names that could be added to the social media lists demonstrating how white violence connects so many Black lives. The father of late blues guitarist Louisiana Red was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan when the musician was 5 years old, and the night-riding Black Legion murdered Malcolm X’s father—who had already had three brothers “killed by white men, including one by lynching.” As a child, Angela Davis knew three of the four little Black girls murdered by the white terrorists who in 1963 bombed the Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church. Rayshard Brooks, fatally shot in the back last year by Atlanta cops—as he ran in a direction that made him a distinct non-threat—was the cousin of This Is Us actor Niles Fitch. Ta-Nehisi Coates has repeatedly spoken and written about the police murder of his college friend, Prince Carmen Jones.
Actor Keith Powell was the cousin of the late Rodney King. In 2017, TLC singer T-Boz tweeted that Peoria, Illinois, police murdered her cousin, “a sweet harmless young man with mental issues,” with 18 shots from their guns. And earlier this month, Pharrell Williams called for a federal investigation into the police killing of his cousin, 25-year-old Donovon Lynch. The cousin of black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace—murdered in 2003 by a cop as he “went to grab his phone to call his mom because he was scared”—never served a day in jail, and Wallace’s family lost a wrongful death lawsuit.
Of course, Black victims of white violence are connected to one another, because white violence has always been—and remains—a constant, enduring feature of so much Black existence. For so many others, the names of lost loved ones will never appear in headlines.
Numbers further attest to this. A Gallup survey released about three months after the murder of George Floyd found 71 percent of Black adults reported knowing someone who had been mistreated by police. For Black adults between the ages of 18 and 44, that figure skyrockets to a staggering 83 percent. The same poll found “half of Black adults report knowing ‘some’ or ‘a lot of’ people who were unfairly sent to jail or who stayed in jail because they didn’t have enough money for bail.” Seventy percent of Black folks responding to a June 2020 Tufts University survey said they knew “someone who has been unfairly stopped, searched, questioned, physically threatened or abused by the police.” For 43 percent of those polled, that experience had been firsthand, “with 22 percent saying the mistreatment occurred within the past year.” Another study released the same month found nearly half of Black respondents had at least once felt like their life “was in danger because of their race.” During the same period, a Harvard study found “Black Americans are 3.23 times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police.” (Oh, and that 2019 study stating there is no racial bias in police killings—the one conservatives keep citing when Black people demand that cops stop killing them? It’s since been debunked and retracted by its authors.)
On the heels of the police murders of George Floyd, rates of anxiety and depression among Black Americans increased by 26 percent and 22 percent, respectively. The researchers behind a 2018 study wrote that “mental health burden from police killings among black Americans is nearly as large as the mental health burden associated with diabetes.” We’re only starting to learn about intergenerational trauma, meaning the way that enslavement, racism, Jim Crow, and ongoing discrimination create epigenetic changes that literally alter our genes. And the long-term impact of quotidian encounters with anti-Black racism—even when there’s no viral looped footage of Black folks being killed by police—takes a toll on Black folks’ physical and mental health.
But what is personal and tangible for folks indelibly touched and shaped by white violence fails to be conveyed through anti-racist summer reading lists and listening series. Turns out, per a 2018 study, that white Americans demonstrate “no negative health effects” from unstinting reports about Black folks being killed by police. White America has always been incredulous of Black testimony about white violence, but the tree recalls what the axe forgets: that the shared burden of white violence in black life is never just a coincidence.
