Opinion: The Unravelling of America: You’ve Gotta Watch To Cry, By Azu Ishiekwene
Trump’s America is worse than anything I have seen in a banana republic. With him, it promises worse. If America lived racism in whispers and pretence before, Trump’s presidency has put it on open display and he’s doubling down.
What next? An argument immediately broke out in my living room, as it well might have happened in many homes around the world wherever this horrific scene was watched. At the end of the movie – a tale of dangerous living, adventure, love, fatal heroism and betrayal – you are in no doubt at all that racism is still alive, well and prospering in the U.S.
As I watched the video of George Floyd handcuffed and how Derek Chauvin dug his knee into Floyd’s neck, life ebbing away as Floyd begged to breathe, I understood why Queen urged her companion to flee the crime scene in that movie, when it was clearly the wrong thing to do. In America, it appears your life doesn’t matter, if you’re black.
He even went back 213 years in time to invoke the insurrection act deploying the National Guard, when the three other accomplices in Floyd’s murder had still not been charged. Trump’s America is worse than anything I have seen in a banana republic. With him, it promises worse. If America lived racism in whispers and pretence before, Trump’s presidency has put it on open display and he’s doubling down.
Sure, Nigeria has had its own moments of shame in the last few days, too. The senseless killing of 17-year-old Justina Ezekwe by the police; the rape and murder of undergraduate Vera Uwaila Omozuwa inside a church, where she was studying; and the continuing reports of widespread killings in Kajuru, southern Kaduna, almost in a cavalier manner, while government appears like a bystander, are all truly heartbreaking.
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