A challenge to the account of George Floyd's death is a lesson on the dangers of contrarianism
A recent challenge to the conviction of former police officer Derek Chauvin in George Floyd’s murder was thoroughly debunked. Credit: AP
By Cathy YoungThe April 20, 2021 conviction of Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin in the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man whose death led to massive and sometimes violent protests as well as demands for police reform and for a broader racial “reckoning,” has become a symbol of long-overdue racial justice.
Yet claims that Chauvin, who received a 22 1/2-year sentence on state charges, was wrongly convicted as a “human sacrifice” to progressive racial politics have grown increasingly vocal on the right. Recently, those theories have been given a more mainstream hearing, only to be convincingly debunked. This controversy should be a valuable lesson on the dangers of contrarianism and groupthink.
The challenge to the mainstream account of Floyd’s death as caused by asphyxiation due to Chauvin kneeling on his neck has come from Liz Collin, a former reporter for the CBS affiliate in Minnesota who is married to former Minneapolis police union chief Bob Kroll, and author and former police officer J.C. Chaix. Their documentary, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” claims that kneeling on a suspect is an appropriate restraint technique taught in Minneapolis police academies, and that Chauvin did nothing wrong. Floyd died from a drug overdose, they argue, and both the public and the jury were deliberately misled.
Those claims have been amplified by right-wing media. But recently, they have also received a sympathetic hearing from respected sources: the YouTube podcast of Black academics Glenn Loury (a conservative) and John McWhorter (a liberal critical of progressive racial politics) as well as The Free Press, a newsletter founded by former New York Times reporter Bari Weiss which positions itself as politically independent.
The debunking comes from former Washington Post columnist Radley Balko, who covers abuses in policing. Balko, who now publishes his own newsletter, explains that the kneeling restraint technique has been approved only for brief use before placing a restraining device on the suspect. Yet a video seen around the world showed Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes, even after Floyd had lost consciousness. Police witnesses clearly saw this as excessive force.
Balko also challenges assertions that the initial autopsy exonerated Chauvin and medical experts were pressured into altering their testimony. His critique is sufficiently solid that Loury and McWhorter have responded with a mea culpa. Loury candidly admitted that he wanted the official narrative of Floyd’s death to be wrong because he disliked the consequences of the outrage that ensued — from riots to less aggressive policing. Loury and McWhorter also noted that their credulity toward “The Fall of Minneapolis” stemmed partly from the fact that in several other cases — like the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri — initial media narratives of racist police brutality did turn out to be wrong.
Loury and McWhorter are right: There are good reasons to criticize both media treatment of many cases of alleged police misconduct and some of the fallout from Floyd’s death, including a chilly climate of overreactions to speech perceived as racially offensive. Dissent from mainstream narratives is not only healthy but necessary in a free society. But such dissent often creates the temptation of contrarianism — skepticism for its own sake, or knee-jerk embrace of misleading, bad-faith “debunkings.” In this particular case, a purported challenge to the distortions of left-wing orthodoxy turned out to be a distorted narrative of right-wing grievance.
Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.
Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.
Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.
