BO­BIE-LEE DIXON

bo­bie-lee.dixon@guardian.co.tt

Lo­cal ac­tivists are cel­e­brat­ing with the rest of the African di­as­po­ra, the guilty ver­dict in the Derek Chau­vin tri­al for the killing of George Floyd in Min­neapo­lis last year.

Just af­ter 5 pm yes­ter­day, Judge Pe­ter Cahill read out the ju­ry’s ver­dict find­ing Chau­vin guilty of all three charges—sec­ond-de­gree mur­der, third-de­gree mur­der and sec­ond-de­gree manslaugh­ter.

The ver­dict sent African-Amer­i­cans and those sup­port­ing the Black Lives Mat­ter (BLM) Move­ment danc­ing in the streets, while some held on and cried tears of joy.

In T&T, cul­tur­al ad­vo­cate Abeo Jack­son told Guardian Me­dia she be­lieved the di­as­po­ra felt some mea­sure of ease but not­ed the work had on­ly just be­gun.

“I think an en­tire di­as­po­ra is not nec­es­sar­i­ly breath­ing a sigh of re­lief be­cause there is still some­thing about this that rings kind of hol­low be­cause of the fact that there are still so many who have not re­ceived jus­tice,” said Jack­son.

She not­ed the jour­ney of the tri­al was a dif­fi­cult one.

“The ten­ter­hooks that we’ve been sit­ting on for the past few weeks with this case has just been like a re­liv­ing of the hor­ror, a re­liv­ing of the nine and a half min­utes and a whole lot of gaslight­ing of peo­ple try­ing to tell you what you saw was not what you saw. And where it al­most felt as though it were George Floyd on tri­al, as op­posed to Derek Chau­vin,” she said.

Jack­son, who or­gan­ised the sol­i­dar­i­ty ac­tion on June 5th 2020, op­po­site the US Em­bassy in Port-of-Spain, in sol­i­dar­i­ty with glob­al BLM af­ter the killing of Floyd, said it was a di­as­poric uni­ty that re­sult­ed in Chau­vin’s guilty ver­dict yes­ter­day.

“That is now the game chang­er when we are talk­ing about ac­tivism against an­ti-black­ness across the di­as­po­ra. It is the recog­nis­ing of these links and the recog­nis­ing of the pow­er and the uni­ty. They say an in­jus­tice against one is an in­jus­tice against all,” said Jack­son.

FLASHBACK – Activist Abeo Jackson, lending support to the Black Lives Matter movement in a peaceful demonstration opposite the US Embassy in Port of Spain, on 5th June 2020.

As a sixth gen­er­a­tion Merikin (Amer­i­can run­away slaves) de­scen­dent in T&T, Jack­son said it made yes­ter­day’s vic­to­ry even more im­por­tant.

“So when you see these very, very re­al links, be­ing a Merikin de­scen­dent and then see­ing this hap­pen­ing decades af­ter the fact and re­al­is­ing in a lot of ways that not many things had changed. The sys­tems were still in place to op­press and erase and vil­i­fy and feel­ing in a lot of ways help­less, that’s when I de­cid­ed the most I could do is go and sit down op­po­site the em­bassy,” Jack­son re­vealed.

But she was not alone in her ac­tion.

“You re­alised a lot of peo­ple around the world in terms of the African di­as­po­ra who start­ed show­ing that sol­i­dar­i­ty and I think that’s what made the dif­fer­ence this time around, be­cause there was an in­ter­na­tion­al light be­ing shone on this case. We all saw what hap­pened.”

She be­lieves with an en­tire di­as­po­ra watch­ing, the pres­sure was heavy and pos­si­bly forced the US to at least ap­pear to get it right this time.

How­ev­er, Jack­son re­it­er­at­ed, it was im­per­a­tive peo­ple un­der­stood this “vic­to­ry” was just the be­gin­ning in the US. But with re­gards to the colo­nial foot­print in coun­tries like T&T, she said there re­main colo­nial is­sues and sys­temic in­jus­tices to deal with.

“Even though we don’t have a mi­nor­i­ty-ma­jor­i­ty sit­u­a­tion per se in terms of black and white, we still have our own dy­nam­ics that are di­rect­ly in­her­it­ed from colo­nial­ism that we need to deal with in our sys­tems.”

George Floyd was killed on May 25, 2020, in Min­neapo­lis, Min­neso­ta, af­ter white po­lice of­fi­cer Derek Chau­vin knelt for near­ly nine min­utes on his neck.

The killing, record­ed live by by­standers, sparked out­rage and na­tion­wide dai­ly protests call­ing for the end of po­lice vi­o­lence against black cit­i­zens in the Unit­ed States.