Accountability, Not Justice

Well, well, well ... so the twelve jurors did the right thing and found Derek Chauvin guilty of killing George Floyd.  It's a momentous moment, to be sure.  I'm just scared that in the long run, this guilty verdict will be undercut by other news that will happen.  The defense will appeal, if it hasn't already done so.  For all we know, that appeal could cut the sentence Chauvin is supposed to get in eight weeks to, like, time served.  And there very well may be another unlawful local shooting done by police in the Twin Cities that will make it seem as if we have wiped out all the gains we made which culminated in what happened yesterday afternoon.  Shit, we already had one during the trial in Daunte Wright.

But this feels like the first time in American history that a police officer has been convicted of killing a Black man in the line of duty.  It probably isn't, but that video finally convinced large swaths of White people of a deadly, oppressive reality for Black Americans.  And despite the defense's attempts to convince just one juror not to believe his or her eyes and ears, the entire jury knew that they saw what they saw.  It is a sad commentary that not a whole bunch of us were convinced the jury would face that reality, but America has had a fucked-up track record of not bringing White police officers to justice for the killing of Black Americans.

And speaking of justice -- a lot of tweets made a distinction between that word and "accountability."  It's a slight difference, but I believe it to be a real one.  No, I guess justice wasn't served yesterday.  Accountability was, however: "Justice implies true restoration.  But [the guilty verdict] is accountability, which is the first step towards justice," said Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said (and thank God and Buddha and the deities above that more Minnesotans elected him to AG instead of that Republican ass-kisser Doug Wardlow).  I don't think I'm much of an activist.  But this is a much-needed and long-overdue step toward being the country we claim we are perpetually striving to be.  So let's get to stepping.