“Guilty…. Guilty…. Guilty.”
Now that the judge has read into the public record three counts of guilt in the case of Derek Chauvin, what are we to feel? What are we to think? What are we to do?
Some of us might feel relieved—eyes flooded and faces as wet as rivers as we reflect on the reality that justice has been more of a poetic, aspirational idea than a material fact, for the most part, when it comes to redressing the harm done to Black people in the U.S.
Some of us may feel relieved because the verdict felt like something akin to justice. So, we cried. We rejoiced. We may have offered up thanks to God, Spirit, Ancestors.
Some of us have depleted our deposit of tears. I wasn’t sure if I could shed any more. But I did. And I wasn’t sure if my face was wet from relief, or because as I watched in virtual community, some were finally able to breathe a long and collective sigh. Or because the loved ones of George Floyd might now be able to rest in their grief. Or because I imagined them holding one another closely, healing outside the purview of a camera, sleeping well knowing that the person who ended the life of their beloved won’t slip out of the confines of a cage like so many other police officers before him (though how can one rest knowing that a guilty charge will never bring back their loved one?). Or perhaps my tears flowed because my sister admitted in our family group chat that she was crying as she watched. And as she watched and cried, I thought about the faith she must summon every time her 16-year-old son, Semaj, leaves the house fully enraptured in his Black youthfulness, only to be read as a threat by some.
I don’t know why I cried while watching an officer of the court cuff a former law enforcement officer who killed a Black person, but I know how I felt: like a driver in a vehicle that has been stuck in a traffic jam for so long who, after having waited with impatient patience, finally begins to move ahead with a deep awareness that further along they might come upon traffic yet again. I imagine that is how some of us felt. And I also know that the Black experience in the U.S. has been a vexing and enduring gridlock under the conditions of anti-Black racism and state-perpetrated violence.
So I understood why some folks felt angry still. And rightfully so, because they might recognize that there exists a form of material justice that we have yet to fully imagine and experience. After all, the practices we employ and the tactics that we use are the consequence of the limitations of our moral and spiritual imaginations, shaped in a country where justice looks like punishment, like cages, like cuffs, like policing the police after the police kills one of us, like more violence as a response to violence.
This is why I am suspended between joy and lament, relaxed shoulders and raised fists: because there appear to be few options outside of other possibilities—the greatest of which is George Floyd still being alive. It seems, so acutely, that the only option at our disposal relies on a system that itself needs to be razed. These are complicated thoughts and feelings.
I am buoyed, though, by visions of a just future that we can collectively imagine and build: a time ahead when we no longer seek to end harm by committing harm because that is all that we know to do. And what better time than now?
We have relied on practices that have come to define empty versions of justice and accountability up until now: big-budget law enforcement bodies; big stockpiles of weapons and equipment for said law enforcement; law enforcement’s use of tasers and guns to respond often to the outward symptoms of entrenched systemic issues; handcuffs; death; jails; and prisons. And while it may seem foolish to demand that we engage in the difficult and complex work of imagining and building toward a more honest version of “justice,” we need to realize that our lack of imagining and building will result in more of the regrettable same—more Chauvins arrested, but not enough Chauvins transformed from the inside out.
Imagine, if you can, a world where accountability is evidenced by someone like Chauvin first reckoning with self and their actions. Imagine a world where a sentence might result in someone like Chauvin having to commit to service for an extended period of time in the very community, on the very streets, in which he took George Floyd’s life. And imagine if that service was centered on Chauvin’s unlearning, contrition, and inner transformation, and not on the use of the service as punishment or saviorism. Imagine a world where Floyd’s family and the community could determine the form of restitution that Chauvin would be committed to performing—a type of service that demands he bring life to the place where he once brought about a death. Imagine a world where the easy way out of a cage is replaced with the harder work of deep accountability, self-reckoning, the seeking of forgiveness, the redressing of harmful systems, and reconciliation. What are we to think and feel and do today, days after the guilty verdict rang out?
Rachel Kushner, writing on the abolitionist thinking and work of scholar and organizer Ruth Wilson Gilmore in The New York Times Magazine, offered the following, echoing Gilmore, “Abolition means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead, of vital systems of support that many communities lack.” This point is instructive.
I have faith in what we might collectively build out of the ruins through which some of us survive, while others are killed. Abolition is the work of building the good that we need in place of the institutions and practices that ail us now.
It is our job, however absurd and inherently unfair, to imagine differently. And we are called, by some vision of a life beyond yet within us, to use that imagination to conjure transformative and just practices. Practices that might ultimately result in Black folks’ aliveness and the abolition of all that robs all of us of life—whether it be anti-Black racism, or prisons, or police.
I want a future where justice is not violence refashioned as beauty in the form of a cage. And I want a world where Black death is not a requirement for that refashioning. I want a future where two hours or so after we might shed tears because of the conviction of one officer who killed a Black person, we won’t discover that a 16-year-old Black girl has been killed by yet another officer. I want a future where I don’t carry the weighty anxiety that emerges in the “traffic jam,” because I would be able to move about with ease and without fear that some Black people stuck on the road with me, like my nephew Semaj, won’t make it home.
I want a life, a future, a world, however seemingly beyond us, that is more just.
May it be. May it be. May it be.
Darnell L. Moore is the author of No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America. His writings have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Playboy, Vice, The Guardian, The Nation, Ebony, and other outlets. He is the director of inclusion strategy for content and marketing at Netflix. And he is currently at work on his second book, which is tentatively titled Unbecoming: Visions Beyond the Limits of Manhood.
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