White America has an ingrained fear of blackness. It’s time to let go of that fear

The deployment of wildly unreasonable subjective fear is often sufficient to justify a wide range of reactions, even murder

It has been a year since George Floyd last drew breath. It has been a year since the multiple videos of his death spread worldwide; since passionate demonstrations swept cities and towns; since personnel carriers filled with soldiers crawled through American streets; since saying" his or her name became a ubiquitous incantation, an infinitely-unspooling litany of death. In the year since, Derek Chauvin, the police officer whose coldly dispassionate gaze riveted our own, was convicted on all counts. It was hard to unsee. And we saw.

Moreover, the witnesses against him included the chief of police; the instructor in techniques of restraint at the academy where Chauvin had trained; the police dispatcher who was watching remotely and thought her screen was frozen because he stayed on top of Floyd for so long; the emergency medical technician who had to reach around Chauvin's knee to take a pulse (there was none) because Chauvin refused to move even after the ambulance had arrived; Floyd's weeping (white) girlfriend who testified to his gentle, generous and prayerful nature; the sheer number of bystanders who called the police on the police"; the crying children; the shopkeepers; the passing martial arts professional who shouted at Chauvin repeatedly, telling him that that he was killing Floyd. I began my own career as a prosecutor and I have never seen a stronger case.