Derek Chauvin is a bomb. George Floyd died, but the shrapnel is everywhere.

Derek Chauvin is a bomb. George Floyd died, but the shrapnel is everywhere.

By Michael Harriot

Michael Harriot is an award-winning journalist for TheRoot.com, where he covers the intersection of race, politics and culture. His book, "Black AF History," is scheduled to be published later this year.

April 10, 2021 at 5:00 a.m. GMT+9

A guilty verdict can’t bring a man back to life. Can it bring a measure of justice?

George Floyd's nephew Brandon Williams, left, and brother, Philonise Floyd, on Friday at the Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis, where former police officer Derek Chauvin is on trial in Floyd's death. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

As someone who has reported on numerous killings by police officers and covers this country’s toxic relationship with race, I have ingested countless images of living, breathing loved ones being transformed into hashtags and formerly alive human beings. I have become anesthetized to the trauma. But once, while interviewing April Pipkins, whose 21-year-old son, Emantic Bradford Jr., was turned into a memory by a police officer in Hoover, Ala., I posed the same question I asked Lucy McBath (the mother of Jordan Davis), Sybrina Fulton (Trayvon Martin’s mother), and the families of many others whose children have been lost in America’s all-consuming racial fire: “What does justice look like for your son?”

The answer is usually accountability, for the offender to be punished for the crime, closure. But April Pipkins’s response affected me more than the sum total of all the high-definition snuffings-out I have absorbed, because I could tell this was a question she had labored over. She stared into her lap, using her hands to smooth out her dress as if she were about to reveal a secret that she was ashamed to tell.

“Can they make him alive again?” she replied, half laughing but with enough sincerity to almost make me believe that the question was not rhetorical. I had no answer, so as I searched my own lap for a reply, Pipkins swatted away the awkward silence: “Otherwise, there ain’t no justice.”

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I have been thinking about her reply as I watch the trial of the former Minneapolis police officer charged in the death of George Floyd. If Derek Chauvin is found guilty — of second-degree unintentional murder, of third-degree murder, of second-degree manslaughter — would that mean “justice?” It wouldn’t make Floyd alive again, any more than Bradford could be made alive again. But that tragic truth aside, a guilty verdict would also define justice narrowly as holding one man accountable for another man’s death. It isn’t that simple. Because Derek Chauvin is a bomb, and a bomb has many victims. The shrapnel is everywhere.

A bomb is known more for impact than accuracy. And it can’t really be put on trial. Chauvin was in some ways merely the instrument — the bombmaker’s creation. America’s system of policing — its institutions more broadly and society at large — is the bombmaker and deployer. Finding Chauvin guilty is not going to dismantle the bombmaking apparatus.

A bomb is built to explode. That’s why it is armed, why it is loaded onto an airplane and dropped onto a target. When the state-sanctioned policing device that is Chauvin improvised its own explosion on a Minneapolis street last May, the blast radius was littered with Black lives. We saw how the shrapnel injured Darnella Frazier. “When I look at George Floyd, I look at my dad. I look at my brother,” she testified at the trial this week. Under oath, the teenage witness revealed that “it’s been nights I stayed apologizing and apologized to George Floyd for not doing more.”

She is a casualty. So are Floyd’s five children, who are now without a father. What about Christopher Martin, the cashier at the nearby store who said he lives with the guilt of doing his job by reporting to his supervisor that Floyd allegedly handed him a counterfeit bill, which led to Floyd’s arrest by Chauvin and his fellow officers? How about Genevieve Hansen, a White firefighter trained as an emergency medical technician who was forced to watch a man die and said she was “desperate” to render medical aid but was prevented by the police from doing so? There are the small-business owners, too, whose storefronts have essentially become tombstones because of Chauvin’s actions. What about Black people in Minneapolis who are now convinced that Chauvin is not an aberration? What about the Black people around the country, like me, who have watched the trial knowing that Floyd’s death is a national story only because it was caught on video?

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As for Floyd, what does this country think happens to a person who grew up marginalized by society in a housing project in the poorest section of one of America’s wealthiest cities? In the richest country in the world, Floyd was the first of five siblings to attend college. If justice was even a prospect, we’d be concerned with how Floyd was incarcerated eight times for drug possession and other nonviolent crimes. Justice demands that we acknowledge how poverty and addiction put him at least partly in the position to be a target of the bomb that was Chauvin. If truth and justice ever existed in America, we’d be having a conversation about drugs, rehabilitation, incarceration, police brutality, race, accountability, the over-policing of Black neighborhoods, the existence of “Black neighborhoods” and being Black in America.

Chauvin’s actions annihilated an entire community. While Floyd’s life may be the one thing that we cannot recoup, we should realize that there are other lives for whom justice should be just as vital. True justice demands that this country not absolve Chauvin, the Minneapolis police department or the American system of policing in general by condensing Floyd’s death to the 9½ minutes that Chauvin’s knee was on Floyd’s neck. True justice requires acknowledging all the victims and the guilty. We have to Google the names of the other officers who stood idly by, because it is easier to point the finger at one villainous monster than to wonder who armed a bomb and sent it into a Black community over $20. It is easy for Chauvin’s fellow officers to blame him for misusing deadly force than it is to ask why police are trained to use deadly force at all. Apparently, we need a squad of predictably explosive bombs so badly that we are willing to sacrifice Black lives.

Or maybe this is what justice looks like. Perhaps convicting Chauvin would finally convince this nation to care that police disproportionately kill Black people — so regularly that it cannot be coincidental. Maybe we can cure America’s ill by hoping for something to happen that’s as rare as making George Floyd alive again: convicting a police officer. Perhaps a prison sentence for Chauvin, the bomb that did, after all, self-detonate, would heal all of the people wounded by his shrapnel. I truly hope so.

Otherwise, ain’t no justice.