George Floyd, an African American man, was murdered by a white police officer on May 25, 2020, after being suspected of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. This incident illustrates how the coloniality of power and knowledge continues to shape our perceptions of Black individuals, reducing them to a state of “nothingness” or “thingification,” where they are seen as threats or objects of elimination, rather than humans. Additionally, little has been done to address the capitalist structures that perpetuate poverty and social precarity, that placed George in that socially precarious situation; his community marked with the permanency of suspicion, criminalization, and restriction of mobility. Floyd’s murder is a continuation of long-standing anti-African (now Black) violence that has persisted since the era of European empires, beginning in 1492. For 8 minutes and 46 seconds, a white police officer suffocated him, and Floyd’s desperate cry, “I can’t breathe,” symbolizes the struggle for life and dignity for people of African heritage worldwide. This incident highlights the historical denial of the contributions of the “Africanist presence” in Euro-North America.
Ghosts in the Machine
For a moment, the world paused—interrupted by a pandemic intertwined with socio-political and economic structures that render certain people, lands, and communities as lacking humans, therefore open, free and available for resource extraction, pollution of the land, and the people, not there; disposable. This moment made visible the systemic violence many of us have known and experienced under oppressive systems. The officer’s indifference to George Floyd’s plea for breath reflects a long history of violence sanctioned by Western “civilization,” including the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the trafficking of West Africans, and the colonization of African nations. Prevailing narratives often portray Black men as “violent and aggressive,” normalizing violence and indifference against them. The global outcry following Floyd’s murder highlights a critical moment of awareness regarding violence against individuals of African descent, revealing deep-seated perceptions that perpetuate a cycle of harm.
Floyd’s death challenges the narratives of “progress” central to Western self-perception, resonating with Toni Morrison’s concept of the “ghost in the machine.” The murder reflects institutional frameworks that perpetuate colonial legacies as articulated by Charles W. Mills, in which the state’s control operates through an “invisible racial contract between white men.” Audra Simpson expands on this by describing “settler statecraft” in the U.S. and Canada, which marginalizes Indigenous peoples and Black communities alike. According to Simpson, the state possesses a “male character, white or aspiring to whiteness, and hetero-patriarchal,” functioning to preserve itself by eliminating those who exist outside its “charmed circle.” Floyd’s murder exemplifies the state’s systematic urge to negate Black life, representing a “failure” of governance that eliminates those and places them outside of its “charmed circle.”
Enslavement, lynching, murders, and social deprivation are perpetuated by societal institutions that sanction such actions through social conditioning and control. These dynamics foster an internal perception that deems certain lives, particularly Black lives, as unworthy. On account of the ongoing nature of colonialism in a different guise, it produces certain humans as worthy of life and protection, and not Others. Very often, it animates what Rinaldo Walcott calls the deputization of all white people to surveil, or police, and in many instances murder a black person in “self-defense.” In fact, this knowledge/power matrix produces a knowlegescape which leads many to perceive Africa, Africans and Afro-Diasporic people and their spaces as “zones of non-being,” distorting their humanity and limiting their life chances. George Floyd’s plea, “I can’t breathe,” exemplifies how cries for help from marginalized communities are frequently ignored or dismissed. This systemic dehumanization extends beyond Floyd to encompass broader struggles faced by people of African descent worldwide. The exploration of oppression reveals a historical reduction of Africans to mere flesh, perpetuating a disregard for their lives. Sylvia Wynter highlights how the Western concept of humanity has historically marginalized Africanness, now linked to Blackness, framing it as a threat. This indifference is rooted in a pattern exemplified by the Dred Scott Supreme Court ruling in 1857, which asserted that Black individuals “had no rights that the white man was bound to respect.” This systematic exclusion from rights, reflects a deliberate design that devalues Black lives, reinforcing a cycle of exploitation and neglect.
Institutions, despite their lofty ideals, often operate under the assumption of neutrality and objectivity—often deferring to or referring to practices and by extension the outcomes of said practices such as “institutional,” all in the abstract. What this typically refuses to face, is that people constitute institutions, make this decision and choices, and more importantly group aligned identity within these institutions often sustain systemic injustice. The lack of recognition of right of man, was an institutional practice imposed by Europeans, who represented and re-presented the African through a series of naming practices in a signifying chain from “negro,” “thug,” and “welfare queen” and other negative stereotypes that shape perceptions and fosters assumptions of inferiority. It is within this knowlegescape that George Floyd’s plea for air highlighted a societal framework that “fails” to see his life as worthy, but more importantly, as ungrievable. Dominant narratives constructed by European men in countries like the U.S. mask the violence of colonialism, slavery, and genocide, upholding their proclaimed superiority while marginalizing those who were forced to labor on stolen land. The discomfort of the confronting the presence of African Americans often leads to the violent suppression of uncomfortable truths.
We are currently witnessing an American administration and far-right ideologues across the West attacking the limited efforts to address the exclusion of anyone who is not a heterosexual Christian, Eurocentric, non-disabled, able-bodied, cis-gendered male. Moreover, this backlash should remind us of the counter-response from many to the “Black Lives Matter Movement” with slogans such as “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter.” While it should be very obvious that all life, human and non-human, have always mattered, it was and still is a bad faith movement that functions to derail the violence against Black people, and global anti-Blackness. The current resistance to addressing violence faced by marginalized communities, that George Floyd’s murder reveals to us, is directly tied to a political and culture war of anti-knowledge; where there is a monumental effort to “move” past the past; one that attacks pursuing the societal structures that produce poverty, educational achievement, discrimination, violence and neglect as “wokeness” and promotes historical erasure—in order to settle back into to the comfort of ignorance and the maintenance of the order of things.
The Last Words of George Floyd
In the aftermath of a Black person’s murder, statements like “I was afraid” often function to justify these killings, backed by media support. In contrast, when non-Black individuals commit violence, law enforcement tends to arrest them alive. Using Freud’s concept of the return of the repressed, George Floyd’s murder can be seen as an unsettling reminder of our “past.” The interconnected histories of Africans, Afro-Diasporic people, and Europeans, particularly concerning civilization, development, and progress, are often deliberately excluded from historical narratives. The saying „the winner writes history“ highlights how these narratives can ignore the other side, which represents the ultimate contrast to the idea of the “modern” man. This neglect, as exemplified by George, reflects an ongoing refusal to address past violence, potentially explaining why we find ourselves trapped in a cycle of violence against others. From a Freudian perspective, Floyd’s death serves as an uncanny reminder of what so-called „civilized man“ has left behind—the „primitive“ aspects of our history. It underscores a haunting connection to a past condition that continues to resonate today.
In the immediate aftermath and maybe racial reckoning, many non-black people performed what Tuck and Yang call, “moves to innocence” by ordering anti-racist books, many of which were not picked up and left unread. Floyd’s murder compelled a significant number of non-Black individuals, countries, institutions, public and private, to confront the specter of coloniality of knowledge and power that infects the life and communities that George represents. His murder emerged as a specter—a haunting reminder within the machinery of modernity; as a disturbing and uncanny reminder that disrupts the narratives, we tell ourselves, wherein the trans-historical transfer of wealth from the Global South to the Global North, and the exploitation based on gender, race, and class, are conveniently omitted from national and international discourse. However, this Africanist presence, importantly, disrupts this cozy exhaling, stride and extension of the normal body into space, it malfunctions its truths, and because of this requires perpetual violence to keep out of view.
The last words of George Floyd— “I can’t breathe”—were a demand for the world to confront what it refuses to do. His death, like so many before him, exposes both the violence and destruction of life in societies built on domination. From the hold of slave ships to those who were thrown overboard, from George Floyd, 46, to Lorenz A, 21; Nahel M, 24; Cris Kaba, 24; Duane Christian, 15; Jean René Junior Olivier, 37; Christy Schwundeck, 39; N’deye Mareame Sarr, 26, and countless others, the insistence on memory—refusing to allow violence to be forgotten—becomes a method of survival. Honouring Floyd is more than just mourning; it disrupts the epistemic order that rendered his breath meaningless. It demands, as Sylvia Wynter articulates, a new understanding of humanity—one that does not require Black death for its existence. Therefore, the struggle is not only for justice but also for legibility—the right to be heard when we say globally, from the continent of Africa, to the Caribbean, the Americas, here in Europe as Africans, Afro-diasporic people, “I can’t breathe.”
Literature
Mills, Charles W. (1997). The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Morrison, Toni (1989). ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature’. In: Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822399889-031
Simpson, Audra (2014). Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Tuck, Eve and Yang, K. Wayne (2012). ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1-40.
Walcott, Rinaldo (2021). On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition. Ontario: Biblioasis Publishing.
Andrew Michel Thomas is a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto. He is currently a visiting researcher at the ZtG, conducting fieldwork for his project ‘Ontological Abduction: Black Queer Geographies as a Problem of Thought, and the Homo Saceren Figure of Modernity.’ His research examines the experiences of gay and queer men of African heritage living in Berlin and their ability to equitably access the spatial resources of their communities.
