“What makes George Floyd so special that they made him famous?” my co-worker grumbled without looking up from his phone. “I mean, you never hear about all the cops getting killed by Black people, and then one cop fights back and wins, and he becomes a celebrity. I mean what the fuck?”
I was desperately trying to eat lunch and read my book with minimal interference. Working construction, I spend my entire day surrounded by human-made noise, the constant racket of tools and equipment and radios and conversation. Lunch often is my only opportunity for relative quiet; but people who work construction generally don’t treasure silence like I do. They talk, sometimes constantly, to fill the silence.
Like everyone else, their lives currently are suffused with two topics: COVID-19 and the protests sparked by George Floyd’s killing. So naturally, when they chatter amiably, their conversations run toward these topics. I wind up hearing their opinions, which they share generously, confident in the knowledge that everyone essentially agrees with them. They get their information, and their filters, from mostly the same places, after all.
“God, did you see the pictures of the protests?” this same co-worker asked me earlier in the week. “There was this police horse with, like, blood running down its face, where some asshole threw a brick at it.” No, I told him, I hadn’t seen this; I asked where he got this from, knowing it’ll probably be the same source, always relayed with a shrug that says the answer is obvious. “It was on the Fox News app.”
No sir, I hadn’t seen any pictures of bleeding horse. When I Googled it later, I found multiple sources sharing the same three pictures of a black horse, wearing police colors, bandaged around its muzzle. Every source was explicitly linked to right-wing politics and included exhortations against the evils of protestors. None of the sources were impartial journalists.
However, the same Google searches yielded another statement from actual journalists: the mayor of Houston apologizing for footage showing a mounted officer knocking over a pedestrian, apparently on purpose. I’d already seen that footage, melded into a montage showing various police atrocities. Cops in riot gear, linking shields and advancing into crowds like an Athenian hoplite phalanx. Pepper-spraying protestors. Targeting journalists.
I don’t pretend for one minute that my sources are impartial. I tend to distrust centralized authority, and like most human beings, I tend to seek sources that share my beliefs. Therefore, I shouldn’t complain too much that my co-workers also seek sources that ratify their pre-existing assumptions about reality. However, there’s a distinct difference that comes across in the language which results.
I say “Fuck the police,” but not out loud at work.
My co-worker, the one who complained about the fame attaching itself to George Floyd, that same day also used a word I won’t repeat to describe Hispanic subcontractors.
He has also dropped the N-bomb.
Remember that image, which has gotten wide traction, of a police officer aiming a pepper-ball rifle directly at a television camera? Man, that made me angry. But to make my anger go away, that police officer need only do one thing: surrender his weapon and stop being a cop. Because I’m angry at him for a thing he does.
When my co-worker describes other people, right there on-site, using the N-word or the S-word, he’s showing contempt for them over something they are. And he isn’t alone. When he complained about how unfairly put-upon the poor, innocent police are by the horde of Black people, our boss, eating his own lunch not far away, nodded sagely and said “Mmm-hmm.”
Which, for my workplace, is remarkably mild. As I've written before, management at my company is as likely to instigate racist language as anybody else. And they certainly won’t quell it. About a year ago, I reached my limit and voiced what I thought was an anonymous complaint about the HVAC professionals playing Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones at maximum volume. My boss told the HVAC guys exactly who complained, and I spent months paying for it.
So when my co-worker uses racial language, I no longer complain. I bury my nose in my book and become studiously deaf. The entire workplace culture is organized against change, indeed against basic fairness. Much as I’d prefer to brazen out others’ judgements to support what I believe is right, I have no fallback for rent and groceries. So I swallow my objections and turn deaf.
TO BE CONTINUED
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