The Chronicle has sighted with utmost disgust a video of an American police officer kneeling on the neck of an African-American, who has since been identified as George Floyd, till he lost consciousness and died.
Reports indicate George Floyd suffered this barbaric act in Minneapolis, a major city in Minnesota, in the United States, after a shopkeeper called the police on suspicion of Floyd using a counterfeit $20 bill.
Videos going viral on social media show the victim was forced to lie on the ground with his face looking down and handcuffed at the back, with the cop, Derek Chauvin, ending his life through a chokehold.
Sadly, no amounts of difficult screams from the victim that he was claustrophobic could convince this officer, who has since been arrested and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter, to stop the restraining hold of George on the ground.
Pathetically, police officers present at the scene stood by unconcerned and rather scared away by-standers who attempted filming the act.
The incident has since opened streams of protests across the world, all calling for justice for George Floyd.
In the U.S., the largely dominant black protesters, which also included some whites, were seen carrying placards to register their displeasure, with some going to the extent of rioting by setting shops ablaze.
We at The Chronicle do not condone any form of riot as a mitigating factor to George Floyd’s painful death.
However, there is an Akan saying that “nsuo tae aponkyereni a ogye woo,” to wit, when the frog is filled with water, it starts to vomit.
CNN tweeted that “CNN reporter Omar Jimenez, who is black and Latino, and his team were arrested by officers early this morning in Minneapolis. Not far away, CNN journalist Josh Campbell, who is white, says he was treated much differently.”
Come to think of it, why should blacks suffer this fate in the supposed land of freedom (U.S.A.), after they toiled with their blood and sweat to help build America into the greatest economy of the world?
Many would have thought that after years of European imperialist aggression, diplomatic pressures, military invasions, and eventual conquest and colonisation that Africa faced between the 1870s and 1900, its descendants, who, through no fault of theirs, happened to have been born in the lands of those who oppressed their ancestors, would not be subjected to nonsensical discrimination. But unfortunately, the contrary has been the narration all along.
According to a 1900 Census, even when blacks had their freedom in Europe, ninety percent of African Americans still lived in the Southern US.
History captures that three-quarters of black households were located in rural places, with only about one-fifth of African American household heads owning their own homes.
Outside of farm work, African American men and women were greatly concentrated in unskilled labour and service jobs, with their children not attending school. Therefore, the members of a typical African American family, at the start of the twentieth century, were said to have lived and worked on a farm in the South and did not own their home.
The point we are making is that no economy can develop without agriculture. Everything is about agriculture.
Imagine the twentieth century when there was not much technology to make farming easier and faster, the blacks were farming under severe conditions to develop Europe and America.
It is an undeniable fact that African Americans continue to largely contribute to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Europe and the Americas.
Evidently, when Ghana organised the ‘Year to Return’ to mark the 400th year of the slave trade, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of African Americans flew down to Ghana, which boosted the revenue of the Tourism Ministry to over $3 billion.
There is a saying that you do not bite the finger that feeds you. These African Americans are helping to boost the U.S. economy and you reward them with inhumane discrimination?
It is for this reason and others that we at The Chronicle condemn any racist act on any human being.
The voices that have sounded and continue to sound choruses of ‘enough is enough’ should, indeed, be enough for leaders across the globe.
We call on the United Nations, European Union, African Union and all leaders of Africa to condemn the act with a strong message of practicable actions against states and countries that pamper racism.
The post Editorial: Blacks are also humans: The injustice must stop! appeared first on The Chronicle Online.
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