Stop lecturing us about human rights and democracy

George Floyd's tragic death is not an isolated incident, not a mistake or an exception. It is a sign of a systemic failure in upholding the human rights of minorities and migrants in America.

Minority and migrant communities face more socioeconomic precarity, inadequate healthcare, shorter life spans, and higher incarceration rates than white Americans. Yet the response of the US government to these systemic problems has been to increase policing, not to try to resolve them.

Slavery is America’s national sin. For around the first century of its existence, it was legal to own Black human beings and abuse them for labor.

That America is facing such a human rights crisis at home perhaps should not come as a surprise. For decades, despite what it has been preaching, it has purposefully undermined international law and the establishment of a robust international human rights regime which would have pressed governments around the world (including the US one) to uphold human rights at home and abroad.

America has done nothing to prosecute grave human rights violations and killings by its soldiers in Iraq and has gone as far as threatening the International Criminal Court, which has opened an investigation into US crimes in Afghanistan.

Indeed, the leading nation of the "free world" has no moral high ground from which to lecture Vietnam on human rights.

Though slavery has ended, its atrocities against the Black community have been followed by a legacy of anti-Black violence and dehumanization in this country.

Without a shadow of doubt, Africans are increasingly convinced that the way forward for their countries does not uphold the American system as a model but as a cautionary tale.

Yet as disappointed as I am with America's dubious modus operandi and deplorable human rights record, I have found strong and unequivocal condemnation of Floyd's agonising death a truly welcome and positive development.

Now stop dreaming on American dream!

I think the situation was so disturbing and ugly, and frightening. It was just frightening that a law enforcement officer anywhere in this country could act that way.

Once again, it feels as if these racial tensions, brewing in our nation’s underbelly for centuries, feel as if they are coming to a head. Once again, that is likely not the case. This will not be the last case of state-sanctioned murder of a Black person. This is not the last incident of violent racism that will ever occur in America. And it is all of our faults.

In 2020, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery were both killed. Taylor was killed by cops entering home with a “no-knock” warrant. Her significant other, thinking it was a burglary, began firing at the police. She was killed during the altercation. The suspect they were looking for was already in custody. Arbery was murdered by white civilians for jogging.

Listing each and every incident of police brutality against the Black community would be far, far too long for a single article.

This question, then, which is without doubt primarily an internal and national question, becomes inevitably an international question, and will in the future become more and more international.