Chauvin verdict a small start

The conviction of white American police officer Derek Chauvin last week in the case of a black man who died while being arrested by that officer in Minneapolis and sparked protests across the US, arguably influencing the US presidential election outcome, will not change much.

Yet it is a verdict that concerns us all. The day after Chauvin’s conviction on all three counts he was charged with, a survey of Asian Americans produced the revelation that 81 per cent of them believe that violence against them is increasing. This is almost one and a half times more than the number for all Americans.

There is evidence that racial discrimination concerns not just African Americans, but everyone who does not look like ‘them’, including Indian Americans.

For South Asians in the US, it is a case of double whammy. They cope with instances of racial discrimination within society and they have to deal with racial prejudice from law enforcement. Among Indian Americans, it is the Sikhs who have been the most vulnerable since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Even Indian ambassadors have not been spared, as the case of a woman envoy who was singled out because she was wearing a sari, by security officers at Jackson-Evers International Airport in Mississippi, revealed. Indian ambassadors who are Sikhs have caught the unfavourable attention of law enforcement multiple times because of their turbans and have had to argue their way out. In recent years, India has had three Sikhs posted as ambassadors in the US, but their high profile has not changed much in attitudes to people who look different.

The latest survey was conducted in the first and second weeks of this month after 110 incidents of vandalism against Asian homes and businesses, beatings and verbal assaults were logged across the US in the previous one year. The most serious trigger for the survey was the killing of six Asian women near Atlanta on March 16.

Most of this violence has been directed against those with Southeast Asian features and has been the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, which Trump, during his tenure in the White House, repeatedly described as the ‘Chinese virus’.

But South Asians have not been spared in this rising tide of hate crimes. They were also covered by the survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. In one incident in San Francisco last month, Subhakar Khadka, an Uber driver of Indian origin, was spat upon and pepper-sprayed when he asked a passenger to wear a mask.

The survey deals primarily with hate crimes against Asians by the public, but Asians have also been victims of police brutality influenced by race. There is enough evidence that racial discrimination in the US is an issue which concerns not just African Americans. It concerns everyone who does not look like ‘them’, including the growing Indian American population.

In his very first week in office, President Joe Biden issued a commendable ‘Memorandum Condemning and Combating Racism, Xenophobia, and Intolerance Against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States’. One of the follow-up actions to this memorandum, which acquires relevance with the Chauvin verdict, is that the state will train law enforcement personnel in dealing sensitively with Asians.

On March 30, in additional actions to the memorandum, Biden directed the FBI to begin nationwide civil rights training featuring modules on recognising and reporting anti-Asian bias. ‘The Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services is field testing a new curriculum focused on law enforcement response and investigation. The course focuses on increasing capacity and competency to investigate and accurately report all actions motivated by anti-Asian bias.’

When Obama was elected to the White House 12 years ago, many people fantasised that the election of America’s first black President would be a historic turning point towards overcoming racism. The Trump years, especially 2020, have proved that the reverse is true. In the same vein, it could be postulated that the election of half-Indian, half-Jamaican Kamala Harris does not portend any end to discrimination against Asian or Islander communities.

The Chauvin verdict does not bring closure even for the family of George Floyd who died at the hands of the police officer who now faces up to 40 years in prison, although 12 to 13 years is expected to be the sentence in this case. It certainly does not foresee an end to a movement for racial justice in the US, the like of which has not been seen in that country since the 1960s when Martin Luther King declared powerfully that ‘I have a dream’ as an African American.

The next chapter in the Floyd sequence will be the trial of three of Chauvin’s colleagues who were with him when he asphyxiated Floyd with his knee on the victim’s neck, making Floyd say repeatedly that ‘I cannot breathe’. These words have since resonated around the world as a phrase denoting police brutality.

Those officers, who have been dismissed from service, stood by as life ebbed out of the black detainee. Videos of the incident show nonchalance on their part, but are they enough to convict them of any criminal charges? Prosecutors in Minneapolis are under public pressure to resurrect third-degree murder charges against them, but is lobby pressure alone enough to convict them of such serious charges?

Floyd’s death was the tipping point for those Americans who had been frustrated not for decades, but for centuries over the way law enforcement gets away with what is literally murder of African Americans. They will be furious if Chauvin’s former colleagues are acquitted in their August trial. A repetition of the events of last summer and violent protests cannot be ruled out if a verdict of innocence is the outcome.

That is why the US Attorney General Merrick Garland announced last week a sweeping review and investigation of the full range of policies and operations of the Minneapolis Police Department to determine if it ‘engages in a pattern or practice of unconstitutional or unlawful policing’. Garland and Biden believe in the proverb ‘a stitch in time saves nine’, but in this case it may be too little too late.