I’m still wrapping my head around what’s happening in the US right now.

Not that it’s complicated, yet I cannot or refuse to accept anything at face value. There has to be a bigger picture. An explanation of sorts. Or constellations of contributing circumstances rather.

Exploring what those might be, and how all humans as a group relate to them, isn’t to diminish the individual suffering of George Floyd, murdered by the state in broad daylight. If done well, the opposite can be achieved: learning, collective remorse, growth.

Two days ago I started jotting down some ideas, before I knew it, my all-over-the-place rambling had taken me all the way back to the invention of friggin’ agriculture. So here’s another go. [takes deep breath]

I’m going to try and zoom out slowly, geographically, historically, and finally swing it back to you and me, and how we might meaningfully re-act in a post-Minneapolis world.

A man was murdered.

A black man was murdered. By a white policeman for the whole world to see. It took four days before the policeman was charged. Which is exceptional in that, most of the time, nobody is ever charged. More broadly, whites enjoy shocking impunity when the victim is black, regardless of whether or not the perpetrator is carrying a badge. The murder of Floyd George was preceded by the case of Ahmaud Arbery, murdered by rednecks in Georgia, was preceded by the murder of Breonna Taylor, a healthcare worker fatally shot eight times by plane clothes police on a mistaken drug raid in Louisville, was preceded by Eric Garner, Dontre Hamilton, John Crawford III, Michael Brown Jr., Ezell Ford, Dante Parker, Tanisha Anderson –I could fill this entire essay with the names of victims.

We rightfully protest systemic racism and police violence. We are allowed to talk about the lingering impact of slavery –as a clearly defined institution with a beginning and end, the healing of wounds, about the need to improve law enforcement training, and we should. Yes, yes, and yes.

But clearly there is more to it. When you talk about police brutality, you have to discuss mass incarceration.

The fact that blacks in America are disproportionately incarcerated compared to whites can be chalked up to institutional racism of, again, law enforcement and the justice system, a vestige if you will, of slavery.

But can an evil institution that was abolished 155 years ago be a reasonable explanation for the fact that today Black Americans make up 40% of the incarcerated population despite representing only 13% of U.S residents? I’m honestly wondering. Sure, there has been progress, such as the Civil Rights act of 1964, the first black US president, but the rate of improvement frankly is glacial. If black parents have to fear for their children’s lives every time they leave the house, grocery shopping, jogging, eating ice cream, the difference to living under the arbitrary rule of plantation owners becomes a moot point.

The conclusion has to be that the dominant group in American society is simply unwilling to relinquish control over the ethnic minority/minorities living under its sway. I speak in general terms of course. Most of the Americans that I personally know do not support the continued disenfranchisement of blacks, hispanics, native Americans, etc. Which then begs the question: what drives this dynamic? Why do whites continue to ‘dominate’ (thank you, Donny) blacks, and other minorities, and, currently, white protestors demanding change? Is it ‘simply’ racism, or is there more to it?

Allow me a short digression here:

I recently interviewed a large number of Belgians who were in some way or other employed in Congo when it was still a colony. Confronted with the discrimination, apartheid, and compulsory labor, they often compare the lot of blacks in Congo to that of poor farm hands or factory workers in Belgium at the time. First of all, injustices suffered by the Congolese are magnitudes beyond the exploitation of late nineteenth, early twentieth century white workers on the European mainland. That said, the mechanisms used by powerful rich white men to remain powerful and rich, to the detriment of American blacks, Congolese subjects, European factory workers, and women, are eerily similar.

What crystallizes here, the way I read it, across three different continents, spanning close to two centuries, is a pecking order. That pecking order has a strong racial and gender component, but is, in essence, economic. Depending on where you are in this pyramid-shaped ‘order’, the size of the baton or the knee placed upon your neck grows or shrinks. None of this is new of course, but it behooves one to zoom out once in a while. Racism, as I’d stated earlier, is ignorance. We should, by all means, hit the streets, and demand: “Don’t be ignorant! Don’t be racist.” But it’s also a means of control, of maintaining an increasingly in-just distribution of wealth.

What does that mean?

As much as the western world has automated production, our current economic system still relies on human labor. The cheaper, the better. And by better, I mean not for the labourers themselves, but to the shareholders of the companies who employ them, who expect share prices to go only up, and for dividends to be regular and plentiful. Ever notice how the stock market reacts positively to high unemployment figures? That’s because the more people look for work, the lower corporations need to pay to hire them. Cheaper labor means higher margins, means more income for top earners.

As bad as racism is in the United States today, a black person’s main concern is to plead not to be arbitrarily murdered in broad daylight. When that very basic existential need is not fulfilled, organising to demand wage increases or fairer housing policies comes a distant second. When whites are conditioned to see every non-white as a threat, it becomes hard to envision any sort of alliance between occupants of the lower, neighbouring rungs of the social ladder. This isn’t some grand design concocted by a cabal of cigar-chomping patriarchs in top hats (although Richard Nixon did in fact instigate the so-called War on Drugs specifically in order to target blacks and protesting leftwing students). Human nature contains greed and fear/racism, but also the ability to critically self-analyse and choose a different path, of compassion, and of true equality. We don’t have to live in this Hobsian nightmare.

What’s different about these protests?

Arguably we should thank Donald Trump for vocalising, in his unique cartoonish fashion, the blatant, systemic racism woven into the American brand of capitalism. Most people would not have believed it if they had read it in a conspiratorial blog post a few years ago. But it is there for all to see now. The children are still in cages on the Mexican border by the way. Betsy Devos is throwing non-wealthy students under the bus. Abroad, the US is simply ‘taking the oil’, no longer pretending to care about human rights. I think Americans are truly shocked about the murder of Floyd George, but I also believe that the wide, ongoing support for the protests goes deeper.

Rampant inequality produced by laissez-faire socio-economic policies, starting in the 1980s, disproportionately affects blacks and other minorities, but middle-class whites are increasingly sucked into the maw of the same runaway tanker truck. Blacks and other minorities suffer more than whites from what is arguably the worst healthcare system of any industrialised country on earth, but the pyramid is so warped that all but a select elite have any reason to be happy with the current economic system. Simply having a job is no longer a guarantee against poverty, access to quality schools or healthcare. American capitalism has run amok. Protestors act out a vein of humanity, love for one’s fellow human being. But the treatment of blacks, worsening rather than improving, can also be seen as a harbinger of an economic system that’s progressively eating its own. Including whites. It is a cruel irony, but the realisation contains within it the hope of a new alliance between regular have not’s and have not’s of colour.

Europe

Racial segregation à la Europe is of course tons more suave and subtle. Smaller patrol cars for instance. That said, while America abolished slavery 155 years ago, Hitler’s only been dead for 75. Labour and housing market discrimination is alive and kicking. Police violence is a real worry for minority youths in Brussels. A boy by the name of Adil was recently run down in of yet sufficiently explained circumstances, followed by a few nights of rioting. Belgian police culture is rife with racism, sexism, and abuse of power. From London, Paris, to Berlin, Europeans march to protest American racism and police abuse. Are we mindful enough of what’s going on in our own backyard? Are we mindful of the economic exploitation, along racial lines, happening right here? Who’s picking our fruits and vegetables? Who’s processing the yummy barbecue wurst, or toiling on urban construction sites? The list goes on, not as a figure of speech… allow me to list all the non-white people maintaining our climate-busting lifestyles:

Children digging up iPhone cobalt with their bare hands in the makeshift mineshafts of East-Congo. Armies of Chinese assembly workers (same iPhones and Samsungs and whatnot) hauled up in tower barracks, in between which the owners have installed suicide-prevention nets. The slaves of Thailand’s yummy gamba trawlers. The millions who have died in recent decades in conflict directly or indirectly related to our addiction to petroleum products.

I didn’t mean to end on such a bleak note, but here it is. Slavery is not dead. Economical and political oppression, mostly along racial lines, is not an internal American problem. It is the very architecture of the current world order. Luckily, this system, by and large white, seems to have hit a dead end. I, for one, cannot wait for it to be over.

Demographically, the United States and Europe, are inexorably transitioning toward a very colourful future. There are those who see that as a loss, who will do anything they can to forestall or roll-back this evolution. I fear them. But I’m also convinced that if people of good will, i.e. most of us, can be made to recognise what is at stake, to stand and march together against this, the lunatic fringe, white supremacist thinking that’s more ingrained in our culture than we care to admit, better days lie ahead.