Earlier this summer George Floyd died after allegedly passing a bad $20 bill buying cigarettes. He was Black. He was killed by law enforcement on Memorial Day, our holiday honoring those who die serving in the U.S. military.
I watched the video recorded in front of Cup Foods only once. Never again. My stomach keeps knotting. I cannot even look at the stills now. I cannot bear to see his face and I am just this side of vomiting every time I think about his death.
After reflecting on this, I think I have figured out why. Fifteen years ago, I passed two counterfeit $20s bills and nothing happened. Not only did nothing happen, but I did not even remember it until Floyd was killed.
To my memory, it was a sunny warm weekend in Minneapolis. My wife, Sue, and I were short of wine for the weekend and we wanted sandwiches for lunch. It is a classic Saturday Minnesota ritual: off to our favorite wine & cheese shop. It’s the best place to go for wine, sandwiches and any cheese we could think of.
Sue had just completed her annual garage sale with a good friend and offered me some cash. I took enough to cover the cost.
The clerk checked our stuff through. I paid her with two $20s to cover the bill, about $35. Moments later she said, “These are both counterfeit.”
“That can’t be. How can you even say that to me? If you give them back my bank will replace them.”
“No. Can’t do that. We give the bills to the police at the end of the shift. I need your name and address and phone number now. And you need to pay for this.”
I had two more $20s from the garage sale and I gave them to her.
“You’re good.” This after she tested the bills.
Then Sue and I walked out and continued our happy afternoon on a bright golden day in Minneapolis.
Why didn’t Floyd have that outcome?
For a lifetime I’ve rejected out of hand any reference to “white privilege” because I always worked hard to make the cut. Nothing was ever handed to me. But I realize that what happened with those two counterfeit $20s precisely embodies white privilege: Because of my skin color, in spite of my irritation & impatience, I got the benefit of the doubt. Floyd did not, and now he is dead.
I’m 82, and this is the first time in my life I have recognized such privilege in my life. Until Floyd was murdered, I never understood that there have likely been many ways where I got the benefit of the doubt.
Jacob Blake is maimed now. Breonna Taylor, killed. My dread has deepened. Another memory has surfaced.
A more frightening event occurred in the late 1970s when my son and daughter were still school kids. I was driving a rental car on a business trip in California. Again a lovely summer day and this time, a routine traffic stop: A trooper signaled me to pull over. I pulled over.
[image_caption]Boyd H. Ratchye[/image_caption]
It is almost unbelievable that I am still alive. I knew I had not been speeding. I doubt any Black dad would have done what I did.
During a traffic stop in July 2016 Philando Castile played by the rules and stayed seated in his car in St. Paul. He was shot and killed by a police officer. With white privilege, a disease toxic and unseen, both Floyd and Castile have lived and died with a counterfeit liberty.
My hope is that memories of personal moments similar to mine return to many white men and women like me. We need to recognize guardrails of white privilege present in our everyday lives. What seems normal is clearly not — the liberty I have always taken for granted is as counterfeit as the $20 bills George Floyd and I took from our wallets.
We must recognize the cultural forces protecting white people, allowing many of us to err, to blunder and then continue the hard work of building a family and a life and a career. At the same time many others lose their lives and opportunities.
It is crucial that whites like me do this now because the more we recognize ourselves in younger Black men and women, the more we can use our influence to help them receive the benefit of the doubt. Then and only then will we all know and have an authentic liberty in our own lives.
Please listen to Black men and women peacefully working for liberty for every one of us. And at a minimum, if you recognize your life in mine, please donate to one or all three of these nonprofits: NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund; the ACLU; Equal Justice Initiative.
Boyd H. Ratchye is a retired trial lawyer and a current docent at Mia, living in the Twin Cities.
WANT TO ADD YOUR VOICE?
If you’re interested in joining the discussion, add your voice to the Comment section below — or consider writing a letter or a longer-form Community Voices commentary. (For more information about Community Voices, see our Submission Guidelines.)
I had my own incident while a college student. Had I been a black male, my grave would be nearly 60 years old, and forgotten.
Excellent comment. Thanks.
I think the key reflection point shouldn’t be on what started the incident but what happened after police had arrived. If the police had been called to the store where Mr. Ratchye shopped what would have been his reaction and interaction with police? That’s the big difference between what happened to Mr. Floyd and what may have happened to Mr. Ratchye had the scenario played out more like apples to apples.
No, that the police were not called in the first place is the key inflection point. No police, no risk of being killed by police.
Except the onus is on the police on how they communicate and clear process. We put cops in many no win situations; however some of these such as Castile and Floyd should not have gone that way–there was no clear communication in the Castile case–he said show me your license and Castile said ‘I have a permit to carry’ or something similar and started to reach, only then the officer stated ‘don’t reach and then shot before Castile could even react. Taylor’s case is a good example of process gone bad and cops being in the middle (the 8/30/20 NY Times had a great analysis of the case). Most of life is muddled; in the case of Floyd, we know Chauvin knew Floyd from past encounters and probably made some judgments. Bottom line, he was in stress and EMT’s should have been called asap. Again how we perceive each other can differ.
I think the main difference was the color of Mr. Ratchye’s skin. Mr. Floyd was unable to be white that day.
White people have no idea how different it is for black people. No idea. None. The police interactions my black clients have told me about, and some cases I have witnessed, I could barely even fathom.
I don’t know how to explain this to people. I don’t know how to make people understand.
Do you think that President Obama’s mother had an idea what it might be like to be Black? No idea? None? Does President Obama (he is half white)? Does he have any idea what it is to be white?
I acknowledge white privilege. I have and do benefit by it.
I also want to point out, it is not precisely equivalent, your tale and the death of George Floyd. You did not have high amounts of Fentanyl and some methamphetamines in your system when you passed those fake $20’s. That is not a reason Floyd should have been held down so long in the way that he was, and it does not make it less of a murder. But your “benefit of doubt” might not merely have come from being white, but that you were not extremely intoxicated.
As to Mr Blake, you were not wanted for third degree sexual assault of your ex-girlfriend, confronted in the midst of a domestic disturbance. That does not excuse by any means the way in which he was shot. However it is not precisely equivalent to your stepping out of your vehicle to confront a police officer, and then backing off when told to.
As to Breonna Taylor and Philando Castille, absolutely horrific in every respect. A lot of white people die by police under similar circumstances, equally horrific and unjustifiable. Most of them are very poor, and are not in any way protected by “white privilege”. Their deaths rarely make the news. By proportion, black people are indeed killed more often than whites by police. It is not a service of justice however to pass off the death of white people by police as not relevant because of their “white privilege.”
We are a nation ever at war. The war on drugs has been a war on black people, but also on poor people generally. We have militarized our police. We have allowed police unions to protect racists in the ranks. Racism is very real. It does not however explain every injustice in this country. There is also a great deal of contempt and condescension toward poor people generally, excusing a great deal of mistreatment of the poor.
As a white male I have a duty to examine my white privilege. As a society, we have a duty to face racism. We will solve nothing however if we do not also examine that generalized, society wide contempt and condescension toward poor people.
Blaming Floyd for his own death, as if anything he ate, drank or injected somehow justified the police behavior disgusts me, as it should you.
Police conduct was forgiven in the beating of Rodney King, due to his alleged ingesting of PCP.
PCP as you know is said to make the victim very powerful.
How can you fall for this trope of War on Drugs as a rationale for brutal treatment of non-violent offenses? Do you expect others to believe it too?
“That is not a reason Floyd should have been held down so long in the way that he was, and it does not make it less of a murder.”
That is what I actually said. The war on drugs is not a war on drugs as much as it is a justification for keeping a boot on the neck of the poor. The asset forfeiture laws attached to it are motive for the police to steal from the poor. Drug indictments disenfranchise a person that they cannot vote nor find good work. Drug laws as they are applied in America are racist, hatred of the poor and hatred of counterculture. Sadism, in short.
I must have missed the part where Mr. Floyd was charged, tried, convicted and sentenced for passing that supposed counterfeit bill. WHo cares (beside the pearl clutchers) what drugs he might or might not have taken that day. If he did in fact have those drugs in his system, he might have fought back, you know, cause methamphetamine is an upper, make you kind of jittery, but no, he was compliant for those 9 minutes while that sub-human murdered him; but the drugs.
It was fentanyl primarily in his system, according to the medical examiner, which is a downer, which is all the more reason he did not need to be held down the way he was, and why the action was malice, which is one of the reasons it was murder.
I’m just pointing out, it is not merely racism that caused this. No one evidently wants to say it, and of course I might get called a racist for even bringing it up, but if you don’t want to run afoul of the police one place one might start is not driving around the city in the middle of the day on fentanyl.
That said, some police are racist, and some police are sadists, and if you are black you might be well adjusted and obeying the law and still get abused, harassed and humiliated by them. And the fact that he was on Fentanyl IN NO WAY is justification for holding him down like that and killing him.
Thank you for being a voice of reason in the comment section here.
William, NONE of the “difference” you raise matter because the police never arrived on the scene in this scenario.
You guys keep imagining different scenarios, this isn’t an imaginary scenario, nor was Floyd’s.
One thing we CAN say, is that it is entirely possible that police responses and training in general have become more lethal and confrontational over the last 15 years, but that’s still and indictment of the police rather than an excuse for killing Floyd. There is simply no plausible excuse or reason for either of these scenarios to end in anyone dying.
Before Philando & George Floyd, as a part of basic driver education, I taught my white kids how to act when they get pulled over by law enforcement. Hands on the wheel, no sudden movements, don’t reach for something without first telling the officer what you are reaching for and where, etc.
Then I remind them that they are white, and that were they black, their concerns about a violent interaction with law enforcement would be much higher stakes. But that they still need to use extreme caution.
I’m not super comfortable with the ultimate statements of “if he were white, he’d still be alive”, or “if I were black, I’d be dead” after seeing the Daniel Shaver video. Benefit of the doubt isn’t a 100%/0% proposition based on your race. There’s a little more gray area than we’d like to acknowledge.
Nonsense. The fact that the police once straight-up murdered a white guy doesn’t change the fact that black people generally don’t get the same treatment of white people.
More whites are killed by police than Blacks. Nonsense indeed.
Truth and reality are not always “comfortable” Brian.
Truth and reality appear to be different things to different people. Let us allow everyone their own opinion rather than condemning them.
Ya know it funny how conservative bastions of durable truths and values turn into the biggest relativists in the room when their arguments collapse. So now there’s no point in even looking for “truth” because it’s a subjective illusion.
Who would have guessed? The right wing seems to have adopted postmodernism.
Look, before you can talk about the racism behind Floyds murder, you have to talk about the institutional racism that leads to a MPLS department that responds to incidents like this in this way in the first place. The training, attitudes, culture, and equipment that put that knee on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes are all part of a racist police culture going way back. It’s not just about comparing these two scenarios fifteen years apart and musing about the possible differences. If a retailer in St. Louis Park or Edina called the police on Floyd, this outcome is extremely unlikely whereas in MPLS, it’s routine. And the difference isn’t Floyd or his behavior, or his drug use, or whatever.
So there would have been no arrest? There would have been no call for an ambulance for a suspect in distress? Please describe the way that things would have “gone down” in the cities you mentioned.
Tom, read the article, you’ve already been provided with the example you’re requesting.
Still don’t see which cities (St. Louis Park or Edina) have a policy that required the same outcome in those situations. The column references very different situations though.
If a white person doesn’t shoot at arresting officers, if a white person doesn’t have a lethal dose of fentanyl in their system when arrested for passing funny money, if a white person reaching for a knife in a car with the children of a woman he has domestically abused, is he they killed? Would it be because they are white?
Reading the commentary, it sounds as though it was the employee that spotted the “fake” $20 that caused the death. Isn’t that blaming the victim of the crime? And, after all this time, shouldn’t we know if the $20 was fake or not? How long could it really take to find out and report since the author knew he had fake bills within minutes?
If a white person shoots up a Bible study group at an African American church and then flees the scene, the law enforcement officers who catch up with him somehow manage to take him into custody without hurting him at all. Heck, he is such a good boy they take him to Burger King on his way to be processed.
The one that gets me is Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old playing with a toy gun.
Now apologists will say that the gun looked real and that Tamir Rice looked older than twelve. (They ALWAYS come up with a reason why the Black person in question deserved to be summarily executed.) Maybe. But he was in the park with his 14-year-old sister, so more likely a kid playing around than an actual criminal.
The cop who killed him drove up and just shot him dead within two seconds.
Now I’m trying to imagine how that scenario would have played out in Linden Hills with a white 12-year-old.
Cop: Hey, son, whatcha got there? Is that a real gun?
Kid: No, it’s just a toy.
Cop: Well, you’ve been making people around here nervous playing like that in the park. Someone could think you really had a gun.
KId: But it’s just a toy.
Cop: Yes, I believe you, but other people might not. I suggest that you play with that gun only in your own yard.
Kid: Oh, OK.
Cop: Thanks, and have a nice day.
Does anyone believe that a cop who saw a white kid playing with a gun in a park, no matter how real the gun looked, would “shoot first and ask questions later”?