TheCable

Some staff of the University of Alberta in Canada have demanded justice for George Floyd, a black American citizen.

Floyd died on May 25, after an arrest by a Minneapolis officer, who pinned him to the ground for several minutes by kneeling on his neck.

His death has since provoked outrage across social media platforms while protests have been held all over the world.

In a statement to TheCable, the academic community said the manner in which Floyd died “symbolizes 400 years of struggle against brutality, oppression and systemic racial discrimination.”

“The assassination of George Floyd, an unarmed African American man, by four uniformed Minneapolis police officers offends our collective sensibilities as human beings, scholars, members of the University of Alberta academic community and individuals with variegated identities and roles in families drawn from around the world,” the statement read.

“The fact that the four individuals responsible for this homicide were actually paid police officers who had sworn an oath to protect and serve members of the community simply magnifies our sense of revulsion, horror and dismay over this incident.

“Those three words: ‘I can’t breathe’ expressed the collective asphyxiation that has constricted the hopes, dreams and progress of people of colour since the days of slavery.

“While four police officers are now charged with the horrific death of Floyd, we must acknowledge that they were not the engineers of the system that made such a despicable act possible. They were merely on a short shift as ‘technicians’; an extreme example of a much deeper, complex, heinous and structural problem.

“We know this because Floyd’s death is only the latest in a constellation of brutal and barbaric acts of police violence perpetrated on minorities, particularly black people, in the United States.

“We hope that this moment calls attention to the need for a fairer and more equitable world. Words are no longer enough. Arrest is not conviction. Justice must be served. Those in authority need to act now.

“We urge those in positions of leadership and law enforcement to commit to removing their knees from the necks of the socially marginalized, and allow them to breathe.”

The academic community also noted that Floyd’s death is one of the “transgenerational violence historically condoned by institutional structures in American society, known for its systemic racism, and aided and abetted by the silence of the majority of its members.”

It alleged that the system, which sustains white privilege, condones systematic discrimination against African Americans in the US and “entrenched bigotry against indigenous peoples in Canada”.

“That knee from the primary assassin symbolically represented a venomous system engaged in the degradation of black lives. It essentially represented a knee on the necks of people of colour; something that is reflected in life expectancy differential, unemployment rate, incarceration rate, education gap, wealth gap, health inequity, and more recently, casualty figures from the COVID-19 pandemic,” it added.

“Daily micro and macro aggressions, routine denial of opportunity and racialized violence impact the lives of indigenous peoples in this country.

“We believe in the truism that silence is not neutrality. There are certain social circumstances that call on us to abhor neutrality. This is one of those situations.”