People are talking a lot about ‘expediency’ and ‘efficiency’. So we should too.

There is a great deal of almost unwitting candor in this admission.

MN wanted to get this right; and by ‘right’ I mean get it as ‘clean’ as possible. As fast as possible, and to that end, they got it right.

Less than 11 months later, a verdict.

But I have Padraig on my shoulder, exhorting me to ask better queries than I have thus far seen in the media.

Just to whose ultimate end were expediency and efficiency served?

Ostensibly, it was in service to the Floyd family; it is a truism, which is also a truth, that justice delayed is justice denied. To the extent that a trial can bring even an iota of healing and closure, that process can begin in earnest now. Let us be clear, it is a healing and a closure that would be wholly unnecessary were Mr. Floyd still with us, but it is not nothing. So yes, there is that.

But.

Despite what I am sure would be protestations to the contrary, the Floyd family were and are secondary characters to the justice system. The main players were Chauvin himself, and also the Minneapolis PD, whose practices and overt and covert policies and procedures came under scrutiny.

So it was to their benefit to keep the focus and the scope as narrow as possible. A prolonged trial would have, no doubt, brought even more to light, both in the specific person of Chauvin, and of the MPD itself. Historical context–and remembrance– is not their friend.

So this expediency is to hasten not healing for the Floyd family, but to hurtle us ( ‘us’ meaning, for the most part, the white populace of Minneapolis, and by extension, the white cohort of America as a whole) past an authentic and durable reckoning and processing of what happened and the antecedents as well; those antecedents being the very elements that allowed May 25 to happen, to hurtle ‘us’ (see above) to reversion and regression and relapse to a collective and collusive amnesia, which is necessary if one is to believe in the rendering of policing as it currently stands.

If ‘we’ cannot do this collective walk back, that means Minneapolis, and Minnesota, and all of America, for that matter, can no longer pretend to believe in the flattering self concept as illustrated by the self deprecating but still idealized tropes of Minnesota/Midwestern ‘nice’; an identity and an ethos which had and has never been extended to Black and brown people in Minnesota, or Wisconsin, or Michigan, or any other places where the public face always includes hot dish, and ‘ope’, and smiles that show teeth and rounded, friendly, credulous eyes.

Put another way, there is a strong disincentive to make Floyd’s murder mean anything, and speed and haste is in service to *that*.

Join us in The Bistro for discussion!