INTERNATIONAL: WILL BLACK LIVES MATTER?

The ten years I have spent in Minnesota were an enriching enterprise. After graduating high school, and college in Collegeville a frosty little university town, I started my Masters in lively Minneapolis, where I lived for two years. All the while I built friendships and cherished relations with people I met in and out of school. I still have fond memories of the incredibly warm families who hosted my brother and me in their homes during school breaks. So much so that I treated Minnesota as my second home after Lahore. 

George Floyd was murdered in the Powder horn Park neighbour hood of Minneapolis. A place where I passed through frequently on my way to the University of Minnesota. I was in Lahore when the news of his murder surfaced. I was shocked and furious. It was unimaginable that the city which had offered love and care to strangers such as myself was suddenly in the international limelight for an act of extreme brutality. And it pained me to see so many suffer as a result.

Initially, I chose not to watch the video that captured George Floyd’s death, because the CNBC story I read on the incident gave graphic details. It was heart wrenching. What Floyd voiced as he lay there on the ground with a knee on his neck — “I can’t breathe” — later became a testimony, encompassing the plight of marginalised people across the globe. No wonder it became an international slogan overnight.     

At the outset, the official narrative painted George Floyd as a criminal who supposedly resisted an arrest. As I finally watched the video of the policeman holding Floyd down, it was even more heartbreaking that there were a considerable number of spectators and other policemen who made no effort to intervene. And as the world knows now Floyd did not resist arrest.