Unite Here, whose majority is of people of colour, best summed it up in two sentences leading President D Taylor’s statement: “This is not normal. Except it is.” That systemic racism expressed itself in the murder of Floyd when a heavy white cop, Derek Chauvin, kneed him in the neck for almost 10 minutes while three other police officers looked on and did nothing. Floyd kept gasping “I can’t breathe,” and spectators, including those videoing the cop’s actions, kept demanding Chavi, stop.

He didn’t, for almost 10 minutes. An unconscious Floyd was taken to a nearby hospital and pronounced dead, setting off a week of protests ever since in cities large and small. Chauvin, who had an 18-year record of misuse of force, was charged with third-degree murder – which protesters also demanded be upgraded to first or second-degree murder. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, it was announced this morning, has been put in charge of the prosecution.

Floyd’s killing was the latest in a string of police killings of unarmed African-Americans, including four in this century in Minneapolis alone, and another, of union member and school worker Philando Castile, in the Twin Cities suburbs. NBC reported on June 1 that a search of police records showed Minneapolis cops kneed people in the neck 44 times since 2015 alone. Police manuals forbid such tactics nationwide, but some cops – including Chavin – flout that ban.

Nationwide, protesters waved signs and chanted the names of unarmed African-American police victims. Among those remembered: Floyd, Castile and Breonna Taylor, 26, an EMT whom Louisville, Ky., police shot dead with eight bullets while she was asleep on March 13 after they broke into her apartment, allegedly seeking a drug dealer. Her boyfriend fired back. It was the wrong apartment.

Protesters almost had another victim to add to the list. Video from Seattle on May 31 showed another cop there kneed another unnamed African-American man in the neck. But that officer’s colleagues intervened and the man lived.

Most of the protests were peaceful, such as 150 people – all white and many holding “I can’t breathe” handwritten signs – in small upstate Keene, N.Y. Some were not. The police reaction was similar: Some was peaceful. In Flint, Mich., and Camden, N.J., police marched with protesters against Floyd’s killing. In Spokane, Wash., and several other cities, they kneeled.

Other cops reacted with force, lots of force. Governors and mayors turned to the National Guard. The U.S. armed forces dispatched an unmanned air drone, monitored from a North Dakota base, to spy on the Twin Cities crowds.

In Buffalo, one African-American police officer who tried to stop others from assaulting fellow African-Americans was pulled off the protests and fired, one correspondent e-mailed People’s World. In New York City, police vans were driven into crowds of demonstrators.

At least six people were killed in the U.S. – in Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, Ky., and Omaha, Neb. — with police killing others in Berlin and London, and more than 4,000 were arrested nationwide. Hundreds were injured, including reporters and TV crews whom police deliberately pepper-sprayed or shot with pepper balls and similar projectiles. One TV cameraman lost an eye. Police tear gas was plentiful.

In Minneapolis, epicentre of the protests, a tractor-trailer travelling 70 mph somehow got onto the section of the I-35 freeway closed to allow protesters to demonstrate and plowed ahead on the evening of May 31. Miraculously, no one was hurt, the protesters stopped the truck and the driver was arrested.

By contrast, Amalgamated Transit Union bus drivers in Minneapolis refused to transport police to confront the protesters there, or to transport those arrested to booking sites. So did unionized bus drivers in New York City.

In Washington, protests centred on the White House, where President Trump, unlike his predecessor, Obama, and his presumed 2020 foe, Biden, threw gasoline on the rhetorical fire. In language reminiscent of a racist Miami police chief in 1967 – or of then-Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley in the April 1968 explosion after Martin Luther King’s murder – Trump had tweeted “when looting starts, shooting starts.” Daley’s order 52 years ago was “shoot to kill.”

Trump’s latest statement, from his spokeswoman appearing on the pro-Trump talk program, Fox and Friends, on June 1, called him “the law-and-order president,” in language also harking back to 1968.

Obama and Biden reacted very differently from Trump. Both blasted the systematic racism the protests revealed. So did the last Democratic primary foe Biden defeated, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt. Congress plans hearings this month on what happened and why, and Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, will introduce legislation to ban military arms transfers to police departments. (People’s World--IPA Service)