In the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States has been in the grip of civil unrest triggered by a series of events laying bare the racist treatment of many African Americans in the country.
The first incident, which was widely circulated on social media, involved a Caucasian woman who, while walking an unleashed dog in a park, meets and gets into an altercation with an African American man about her breaking park rules.
She quickly calls the police to complain about an African American man ‘threatening her life’, despite the obvious fact that the man was quite calm as he recorded the incident on his phone.
This incident demonstrated a quiet truth about life in the US, that the colour of one’s skin can often determine whether they live or die in times of uncertainty. Institutionalised racism means that a call by a Caucasian woman complaining about a dark-skinned man amounts to weaponising an entire police department, with potentially lethal outcomes for the man.
A dark-skinned man can be arrested by police for almost any reason, including ‘fitting a description’ that can be as vague as a ‘tall black man’.
This devastating truth was later demonstrated when four policemen in Minneapolis, Minnesota arrested another African American, George Floyd and very publicly suffocated him to death as he pleaded for his life. The event was recorded and distributed on social media by passers-by, sparking demonstrations across the US and in many cities across the globe.
The killing of George Floyd by a police officer who brazenly stared for minutes into the recording cameras as he snuffed out the man’s life is emblematic of the problem that humanity has grappled with for ages. It is the ancient problem of tribal othering and exclusion and the fallacious human attitude that “my tribe is better than yours”. This makes it okay for members of ‘my tribe’ to harm those of other tribes, as long as I perceive it to be even peripherally beneficial to my tribe.
It gets worse if my tribe enjoys the trappings of state power as is the case in the US, where the ‘white’ tribe enjoys way more power than any of the other tribes. When threatened or humiliated, members of the ‘white’ tribe have the option of summoning state power to fight on their side, a privilege other tribes do not have. Members of the tribe who are considered particularly vulnerable, such as women and children, are required by some tribal code to be more closely protected from the more threatening members of the ‘non-white’ tribes, usually dark-skinned, big-bodied men.
The US has struggled with this tribal conflict since its very founding as a modern state, when some tribes were considered so inferior that they were often bought and sold as property. To be fair, the country fought a civil war over this very question, but it appears that the matter has never been conclusively settled. A significant proportion of members of the ‘white’ tribe believe in their tribal superiority over the others and consider themselves to have a greater claim to the bounty of America than any other tribe, including the indigenous ones.
Due to her position in the league of nations, America must find a lasting solution to this latest tribal conflict for the sake of global stability and peace.
Lukoye Atwoli is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Moi University School of Medicine. [email protected]
