The global outrage and solidarity we are witnessing is born of years of oppression and glaring injustices meted out to people of African descent which has ignited a flame of protests, fanned by the whirlwind that Marcus Garvey’s teachings predicted.

One man’s death has brought into sharp focus the suffering of his own people globally; however, protesters are from all races. It is as though the youth of our human family have said “Enough is enough!” They seem guided by the truism that injustice to anyone is a threat to justice for everyone, and have faced off with police forces whose powers are now under serious review.

US actor Will Smith has said, the cruelty has always been unleashed on black folks, and all that has changed is that it’s being filmed. The chokehold which took George Floyd’s life, and which was permitted up to now, has been removed from the hands — and knees — of the police. Did the powers that be in the USA not know that police using that lawful chokehold for over eight minutes, along with other forms of lethal force, and combined with raw racism, was bound to result in the genocide of its African American population?

And it seems the massive denouncement of the choking of Floyd was not sufficient to deter the cops who, three weeks after Floyd’s killing, awoke Rayshard Brooks from his final sleep in Atlanta and, with no criminal complaint made against him, shot him in his back as he tried to escape being arrested. Telling them he could walk to his sister’s home rather than drive under the influence of alcohol, as his daughter’s birthday was the following day, could not appeal to their basic humanity. This has rekindled right-minded Americans taking to the streets to condemn yet another senseless killing of a black man.

An African American protester said he was prepared to risk contracting the novel coronavirus in taking to the streets to contribute to halting the killing of black men by those sworn to protect them. Others have said that police have enjoyed a free-for-all because institutions of the State have allowed them to. From rulings as to whether the police should be charged for injury and death, to court decisions literally licensing the police to carry out extrajudicial killings, and outrageous verdicts by all-white juries, all have contributed to the people taking to the streets. When our institutions fail to deliver justice, in the words of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, “rioting becomes the language of the oppressed”.

Who could have envisaged that the people power of protestors would lead to defunding the police, diverting these funds to social programmes for African Americans? Police use of lethal force and accountability for their conduct are now the focus for several police chiefs, mayors, and city councils. Innumerable black men have lost their lives all for a litany of small offences, ranging from minor traffic violations to passing an alleged fake US$20 note, and others for no known reason other than their ethnicity.

Isn’t it ironic that the note over which George Floyd lost his life was the same US$20 note that ought to have had the image of Harriet Tubman, an abolitionist, formerly enslaved woman? In 2019, that note’s image change was delayed by six years so that Andrew Jackson’s (a slave-owning president) image remains throughout the Donald Trump presidency even if he receives a second term.

Racism, an American pandemic, has now been classified a public health issue in ways similar to that which we, in the reparation movement, have argued our former enslavement has inflicted on our population.

The protest over Floyd’s murder has bloomed to take in other burning global issues, all geared at cleaning up the colonial mess. Monuments of Europeans who excelled in selling our enslaved ancestors, and who opened the gateway to the transatlantic trade in Africans, are now being taken down and abandoned in dishonourable graves. Will the statues of Columbus, Hawkins, Victoria, and others misnamed as heroes withstand the storm of protesters across the world?

On the list of those who advocate reparatory justice is the return of artefacts to their place of origin, having been illegally removed by European colonisers. Jamaica has its own claim for the return of Taino artefacts, including the image of the rain god Boiyanel and the carving of a spiritual bird man found in a Jamaican cave in 1792, now sitting in the British Museum while its worshippers have been made almost extinct by Christian invaders.

It is the writings and warnings on the wall that have been transcribed to placards of protesters previously ignored. No longer can officialdom turn a blind eye to blatant injustice. There is a new world court of justice which is the globalisation of the march in support of good over evil. America has been put to shame and, like COVID-19, its wrongs have been transmitted to the four corners of the Earth. The new warning to all governments worldwide is that none shall escape the show of solidarity in support of the oppressed.

Bert S Samuels is an attorney-at-law. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or bert.samuels@gmail.com.