Biodun Jeyifo
First section: 1:00 a.m., Friday, May 29, 2020, Boston, U.S.A.
This piece is almost unlike anything that I have ever written in this column. It has two sections. In the first section that I will write up before I go to sleep in slightly over an hour from now, I will deal with video images and audio track of the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota in flames that I have been watching on television in the last three hours. In the second section that I will write when I wake up around 8:00 a.m., I will write about my considered thoughts, my reflections on the things that I will be writing now before I go to sleep. But then, think about this fact: by the time that you, the reader, gets to read the whole piece on Sunday, May 31, 2020, it would be two whole days after piece was finished and sent off to my Editor for publication. Thus, indisputably, by the time that this piece is being read after its publication, much would have transpired by way of developments and commentaries on the things that I write about in this piece. Will the things that I will say in the piece hold up to further developments on Friday, Saturday and Sunday? That is the challenge that I face.
So, here goes with the first section of this submission consisting of a bare reporting of the things I have been watching on tv in the last three hours – images and sounds of Minneapolis burning. As I watched mesmerized, amazed, I knew, I felt, instinctively, that millions of others in America and around the world are watching the same real-live drama that I was watching. This was not the first time that I and the whole world was watching an American city in flames because of anti-black racist violence. But for some strange reason, this one seemed different, very different. It took me some time both to grasp and understand this difference of Minneapolis burning, burning.
The whole thing seemed like watching a mild, seasonal rainfall grow into a raging and destructive typhoon, almost imperceptibly. Beginning with boisterous and militant but relatively peaceful slogans, chants and songs, the protestors were in the third day of demonstrations over the execution of George Floyd, a black man, by four white officers of the Minneapolis Police Department. At first, television broadcast of the event was sparse and intermittent, necessarily sharing broadcast space and time with other urgent issues of the day and the moment, like updates on the scourge of Covid-19 and the unfolding implosion of the global economy. But again almost imperceptibly, what was happening in Minneapolis began not only to dominate other news items, it ultimately began to be the ONLY thing being broadcast on tv, hour after hour after hour. Portentously, this development coincided with the protests becoming more and more inflammatory, literally and figuratively.
The critical turning point came when a police precincts (American for police station) was overrun by protestors and was then set ablaze, mainly for two reasons, The first reason: the police defending the precincts were over-powered by the sheer number and determination of the protesters. The second reason: for tactical or strategic reasons that we do not know now but will probably know in a couple of days, the police melted into thin air, left their station undefended and simply let it burn. No backups of other police units or the Army National Guard, already mobilized, appeared. The protestors were in complete control of the police post and the streets, both now engulfed in flames. Thereafter, the name of the slain George Floyd became the dominant audio item in the unfolding saga of Minneapolis burning. How did this happen? A sing-song chant of a two-line victory chant began to be repeated again and again: “What’s my name?”; “George Floyd!” “What’s my name?”; “George Floyd!” At that point, commentators took over control of what we were all watching and hearing, unbelievingly: an American city burning, undefended as protestors and “rioters” took control of the city or at least a section of it. Burn baby, burn! This was too much for most pundits and commentators.
I have retained one final image, with its own eerie sounds, from my three-hour marathon encounter with this extraordinary event. What is this image? The skyline lit up by the reflected after-glow of the flames, protestors now mostly seen as silhouettes, buildings and streets like a smoldering war-front right after the cessation of hostilities. Except that right until I decided that the main fare was done and only the aftermath or afterglow remained, I did not hear of a single fatality and, indeed, almost no mention of injured people or policemen and women. Burn, baby burn! But nobody “burned”: that was the final residue of Minneapolis burning, circa May 28, 2020. Of course, we will have either confirmatory evidence of this or, conversely, countervailing evidence that some bodies have been discovered, some souls lost. Right now, I testify that no deaths were recorded tonight, the night of Minneapolis burning, Thursday, May 28, 2020.
Second section, 8:00 a.m., Friday, May 29, 2020
I am picking up from where I left off and went to sleep four hours ago. Deliberately, I have neither listened to the radio nor watched the tv since then. Why so? I wish to keep the phenomenological “integrity” of what I watched last night intact. That was why I first set out in this piece to write a bare account of the things that I saw and heard on tv last night. Of course hereafter, in the days and weeks ahead, I, we shall know more of what happened last night and perhaps that will shed new light on what we saw and heard. But for now, I wish to keep intact the memory, the “integrity” of what I saw and heard last night. Thus, let what I now write in this second section of this essay stand as a distillate of thoughts about what I wrote in the first section last night.
I have given this piece, with its two sections, the title “The fire this time”. At first, I wanted to give it the simple and uncomplicated evidentiary title of “Minneapolis burning!” But I decided on the title that I settled on because I intended a reference to James Baldwin’s nonfiction work published in 1963, the celebrated The Fire Next Time. Easily one of the greatest works of nonfiction in 20th century American and world literature, Baldwin’s book was the first book to propose this startling thesis: American racist hatred and fear of black people, together with the terror and violence that often goes with them, will only come to an end and a humane restitution when whites come to a full realization that they are also victims of their hatred and fear of black people.
Even more startling was Baldwin’s second argument in the book that though American whites believe, as good Christians, that they should finally accept the humanity of black people, it is actually they, the whites, who need to discover and take for granted their own humanity. There are other extraordinary moral and psychological insights in The Fire Next Time, but these are the two main insights of the book that have entered into the mainstream of 20th century American and world anti-racist and anti-colonial thought. Here are these two ideas at the heart of Baldwin’s book: It is the oppressor, it is the white racist and his culture that, being out of touch with their humanity, must rediscover it in order to be able to take it for granted. For if you cannot take your own humanity for granted, you will always need what you deem to be the inhumanity of other races, other peoples, to give you the assurance, the certainty of your humanity. Please think carefully of what the world has seen in the video images and audio clips of the execution of George Floyd by those white police officers in Minneapolis last Monday: Floyd can’t breathe, he is choking, he is being killed and as this is happening the white police officers keep the strangulation going; they cannot see a common humanity between their kind and Floyd’s kind. But whose humanity is called into question in the encounter? Whose (re)presentation of their racial claim to humanity is profoundly questioned in the encounter which has been watched a thousand times on tv and the social media throughout the world, Floyd’s or the four white police officers?
Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, believed that ultimately, white Americans in particular and whites all over the world in general, will ultimately be able take their humanity for granted and therefore stop needing the inhumanity of blacks and other non-white peoples to give them certainty of their humanity. What if this never genuinely happens? The answer to this question is what is implied in the title of the book. For according to the biblical myth of Jonah, the first time that God wanted to destroy the world for its sins and iniquities, he used water, he used a global holocaust of flooding to carry out the apocalypse. But Baldwin in his book famously said, no, not water, not flood next time, it will be fire! That’s why, last night as I watched Minneapolis burning, burning, but no lives destroyed, I thought I was watching a fulfillment of Baldwin’s prophecy: the city, America, the world is in flames and all the infrastructures, all the personnel of control and security in whiteness, of monstrously inhumane order are gone, or they are nowhere in sight. Surely, of course, this is only a parable, because by this afternoon, by tomorrow, we can be sure that the forces of law and order, of unjust and inhuman social, economic and racial predatoriness will be back in view and on display. But no one can deny what we saw and heard last night.
One final thing to keep in mind as I bring these reflections to an end. Did I say that as Minneapolis lay smoldering in the after burn of last night’s saga, the protestors became rather like silhouettes or shadowy doppelgangers of an army of righteous avengers? Yes, I did, but not in so many worlds. Now, I wish to expatiate on that description. You could tell, compatriots, that this band of protestors, even in their ghostly shadowiness, were a rainbow crowd of black, brown, Native American, Asian and white people. I think, I expect that some commentators and pundits will soon be calling it a black crowd, or its more coy version, “ a mostly black crowd”. But this will be false and the evidence will be there to prove its falsehood. Does this rainbow, multiracial conflagration bear any relationship to the overall Covid-19 context of Minneapolis burning? Yes, I think so. But also, I have this thought in mind: Baldwin’s insights and predictions in The Fire Next Time have come full circle. The blackness and whiteness and brownness of skins hide a common humanity that will, must be rediscovered and reaffirmed if we are to survive as one indivisible human community.
- Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
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