A Tale of Two Narratives

A few friends of mine on Facebook got really excited yesterday about a video from one Candace Owens where she says that she does not accept the "narrative" that George Floyd is a hero or a martyr. The video then gets into some details of the checkered past of George Floyd.

These friends took this video to be incredibly revelatory, a must-watch. It all seemed strange and extremely unhelpful to me in several ways, mainly because I hadn't heard or seen any sort of narrative that emphasized that George Floyd was a hero. This mischaracterization of the "dominant narrative" is a routine tactic of the Trumpists. They then deploy their rhetoric against this supposedly dominant narrative, easily showing it to be wrong. In other words, it is classic straw man argumentation.

Straw Man arguments are often intended to distract people from some difficult or inconvenient truth. So, if we put the focus on the question of whether George Floyd was a good guy or not, we have removed the focus from whether the police were justified in slowly, calmly, and remorselessly asphyxiating him.

Bottom line, it's important to note that there is no dominant George-Floyd as hero narrative out there. Tellingly, Candace Owens did not provide any evidence of such, nor did my friends. What I've seen instead is the George Floyd as Victim of Police Brutality narrative, and that is quite obviously a true one.

So Candace Owens mischaracterizes the dominant narrative for her own purposes. Something that needs desperately to be addressed in this country, racial injustice, is set aside in favor of addressing the worthiness of George Floyd. Candace Owens may indeed be earnest, but there's a reason why the Trumpist crowd is in love with her video. The "narrative" driving the unrest in this country right now, the narrative of racially motivated police brutality, is one they too would like to undermine or replace with something easier to manage. 

A final point: any response to the George Floyd killing that is not underpinned by horror at injustice, mourning for our nation, empathy and mercy for people facing this sort of brutality, cannot be considered Christian. My friends who spread this video on Facebook are all people who consider themselves believers, but they have set aside the Jesus who did not question the woman caught in adultery about her sins, but sent her persecutors away in shame. Or the Jesus who did not interrogate the thief on the cross to see if he had lived a life deserving of mercy, but simply had absolute, immediate, and unadulterated mercy toward him.