It was so hard to listen to yesterday’s verdict | Opinion

Person holds sign in front of George Floyd mural

Maurice L. Hall, dean and professor at The College of New Jersey School of the Arts and Communication, said the verdict in the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin felt too momentous, too consequential for where we are as a country. I thought to myself, “If they let Chauvin go, then what...? (AP Photo/Morry Gash)AP

By Maurice L. Hall

I couldn’t listen to the radio in the car this evening at the moment the George Floyd verdict was announced. I couldn’t listen, because the decision felt too momentous, too consequential for where we are as a country. I thought to myself, “If they let Chauvin go, then what...? Where do we go from here...?”

That was not the jury’s decision, fortunately. I was relieved to know that a jury of peers looked at the same video we all looked at and came to the same conclusion — that this horror cannot stand.

But I was haunted by the question “Why do I care? Why does it matter in New Jersey what a jury decides about a murder case in Minnesota? Why am I impacted by this?” And the answer is unsettling...

Because as a Black man, I am George Floyd — or at least one potential police stop away from that circumstance.

The horror of the Floyd killing is that a seemingly innocuous series of events that, taken individually, are unremarkable, nevertheless, because of the history of state-driven violence directed at Black bodies in this country, led to all-too-familiar sights — a dead body, grieving families, angry fellow citizens.

The Floyd verdict is important in New Jersey because the random set of circumstances that brought Chauvin and Floyd together produced a result that is not unique to Minnesota. Very few people I know in New Jersey would look at the Chauvin case and go, “Well that can’t happen here!”

And that is the horrible point. Particularly as Black and brown people, we are subject to this kind of state-driven violence whether we live in New Jersey, New York or Florida.

But, here is the other unsettling reality — and this is why I couldn’t listen to the reading of the verdict on the radio, the reason why there was a knot in my stomach before I read the news on my phone — if the jury had acquitted him, had found him not guilty of that heinous crime then the other almost unspeakable, reality would set in that as a country, we are Derek Chauvin.

As individual citizens given special powers by our government, Chauvin, like the jury in the case, acts in our name. Depending on the verdict, either the jury or Chauvin represented our collective response to George Floyd’s killing yesterday. Not convicting Chauvin would have made us complicit in George Floyd’s death.

For, at least this moment, I am glad that George Floyd, in the most horrific, ironic sense of this word, “won.”

Maurice L. Hall, Ph.D., dean and professor at The College of New Jersey School of the Arts and Communication.

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