George Floyd, In memoriam
Plotinus understood life. Life is not a quantity! He claimed in mysterious lines hard to decode. In these few words he decapsulated the whole enigma of livelihood. According to him, everything, from the skies and the suns until the tiniest microscopic mineral was endowed with life, participating of this joyful gift of plenitude. In contrast, the most living of living beings, the most empowered of life and illusions of eternity, humans, seem to disrespect this mystery, this unquantifiable, unmeasurable power inasmuch as they are so happily killing beings, killing minerals and ants, destroying animals, burning mountains and even contemptuously killing each other with the most outrageous means, nevertheless void of any sense or meaning.
Charles Mills wrote the “racial contract” now so actual in the face of the death of George Floyd, whose name has remained in my skin since his cruel and merciless fading away, his assassination in the hands of the so called authorities of powerful institutions almost half responsible of a tacit contract with racism. As Adam Serwer in the Atlantic[1] records, the death rate of Afro-Americans or Latinos in the United States killed by policemen is about 1000 per year, where it is difficult to assess, if the crimes were actually done motivated by the terrible invention of some supremacist groups, namely, racism. Difficult indeed to elaborate the whole history of the tacit contract, racial contract, reigning with impunity in different territories and in diverse dimensions, and even within legal systems, as Mills argues.
The argumentation of Mills is based on numbers, but also in the ideas behind the numbers. The death of people whose very unimportant color was looked upon as a crime, was overrated as the worst appearance men can have in some confused worlds. Full of indignation we should face the death of Floyd and of many others, whose name should always be remembered, as a symbol of the deadly crime of being a person of color. The problem with colors assigned to the human skin, is that colors are not just colors, but symbols, signs, interrogation and exclamation marks, or as in the case of many already gone: endpoints in the lines of their brief lives.
A well-remembered Mexican-Ecuadorian philosopher, Bolivar Echeverría, said once, that white is not a color. Indeed, even physically speaking he was right. White is a construct, a complex structure of power, of “heavenly” rights, of “just” wars, of justification of murder, torture, violation, in sum of supremacy. It is a fair looking skin covering the values and the concepts which made slavery, conquest, imperialism and finally, racism possible.
“White is not a color” is not a simple idea: it contains a whole source of wisdom and vision. When we see each other, face to face, there is no color in between: there are eyes, and minds, and lives in play. The last thing important is the skin which just protect us, or in some cases, exposes us to unforeseen dangers. The dangers, not produced by the skin, but IN the skin, then internalized in the blood and even in the soul, if we call to remembrance the Debate of Valladolid (1550-51), where the existence of the soul, meaning the human existence of some “individuals” was called into question, in order to justify the divine assignment to “correct” the false ways of the false color, the non-white –whatever that means.
How white is whiteness? That is so absurd as to try to measure the different nuances in color of each olive in the world, the green, the fair green, the black, the pale olives, the yellow ones. And then again, each color, each kind of olive could be further divided into individual colors, the pale within the pale, the darkest within the black olives, and so on ad nauseam. What would we do if we find a pale one within the dark ones, should it be classified as a “pale-dark” olive, which is somehow a contradictio in adjecto, or maybe as a “dark-pale” olive, which doesn’t come close to any meaningful solution? What if we find an albino-olive? Does it pertain to the realm of albino-olives? But aren´t they albino-dark belonging olives and albino-pale related ones? This olive-classification is so absurdly near to the Nazi-selection of “Judaism” or to the old Spanish classification of races: mestizo, mulato, and so on, which somehow as concepts, and sadly sometimes as hipostasiated personal existing substances, remain even nowadays.
Violence seems to me at times a very tiny word to understand its extreme meaning or meaninglessness, how did it make its way through humanity in so varied and even, cynically expressed, artistic figures? Violence is just a result of something else, of something which is nonviolent in appearance. Violence is sometimes as peaceful as the white color from the clouds. Violence can emerge even in the gaze, in the way two faces encounter each other. Violence has indeed many faces, and that is precisely its efficiency. To call the police because a guy supposedly paid with a fake bill of no more than 20 bucks, to call the police because a guy “seems” to be harassing me, or because he is conspicuously and cruelly running and ruining in my beautiful white street. These innocent calls out of desperate and hungry empty hearts are maybe not as innocent and friendly as the voices in the phone pretend to be. These innocent calls called the police, and then the violent chain began with this short anonymous call, and so the police came and without even watching around, just like an automatic radar, goes and chases the darkest face in the room, in the street, in the parking lot. And then, why not, kill him, ´after all he is dark and therefore guilty´, ´after all he is poor and therefore guilty´, ´after all he´s supposedly a narco and therefore guilty´. Guilt is a construct integrated in dark faces, in the colorlessness and soullessness of undervalued living beings.
Life is not a quantity and neither a color.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/americas-racial-contract-showing/611389/
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