The George Floyd Protests

MAY 25 2020 · 12:00

George Floyd protest at Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, 7 June 2020. Place: Minneapolis, then approximately 2,000 US cities and 60 countries Figures: George Floyd, killed · Derek Chauvin, Minneapolis Police Department officer · Darnella Frazier, the seventeen-year-old who filmed it · the millions who marched, in twenty languages Nine Minutes Twenty-Nine Seconds On the evening of 25 May 2020, the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneels on George Floyd's neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, on the pavement outside a convenience store at 38th and Chicago. The seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier films it on her phone. The video is on social media within hours. By 28 May the precinct house is on fire. By the end of June, fifteen to twenty-six million Americans have demonstrated, the largest single wave of protest in US history. Parallel marches occur in at least sixty countries, on every continent except Antarctica, in cities (Tokyo, Berlin, Sydney, São Paulo, Seoul, Cape Town) with no obvious stake in Minneapolis policing. The organizing infrastructure is not the union hall or the political party. It is Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Telegram, and the encrypted group chats on Signal that Hong Kong protesters had popularized eight months earlier. The platforms' sovereignty footprint, what laws they obey, what speech they enforce, whose police can subpoena their data, is unclear to everyone including the platforms. Whose Police, Whose Public The Westphalian state's monopoly on the legitimate framing of its own policing is, classically, an internal matter. Article 2.7 of the UN Charter (see [[un-charter-1945]]) forbids intervention in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction. Floyd's killing is litigated simultaneously inside that jurisdiction (Chauvin is convicted of murder in April 2021) and outside it (the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Council of Europe, the foreign ministries of Iran and China and Russia, all weigh in within days). The protests are the first major transnational political movement organized at speed through streaming-era infrastructure. They do not produce a treaty or a new institution. They produce a demonstration: a domestic policing event in one American city can become, in seventy-two hours, an item on the foreign-policy agenda of every Westphalian state with an internet population, without any state's mediation. The international public is not in the Charter. It is now operative anyway. Video: AP retrospective on the protests that swept the United States and more than fifty countries after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, 25 May 2020. The largest protest wave in U.S. history, peaceful in 93 percent of recorded actions.