NOTHING CONCENTRATES THE MIND ON RACISM LIKE DONALD:

Now something has changed. Pretty much every living soul has watched the video of a Minneapolis cop with his knee on George Floyd's neck, grinding his face into the pavement as Floyd pleads, cries, and dies. He's not the first black man to die on camera: we've all seen it many times before. There was Floyd's fellow Minnesotan Philando Castile, shot by police in front of his girlfriend and her four-year-old child and Eric Garner, put in a chokehold by an NYPD officer who ignored Garner gasping, "I can't breathe." But this time it feels different, as if a wire worn thin over too many years finally broke: as if a critical mass of Americans finally realised that too many of our police equate dark skin with criminality and violence. Many of us are just now coming to the truth that law enforcement officers too often serve white privilege and white property, not justice.

Perhaps three and a half years of Donald Trump's race-baiting presidency is raising the national consciousness. The white men now charged with the murder of Arbery claimed he looked like somebody who might have robbed a local construction site. That's code: he was a black guy in a mostly white space. An intruder. The white woman who tried to weaponise the police against a black bird-watcher who told her to leash her out-of-control dog in Central Park. She shouted into her phone: "an African-American man is threatening my life!" Behind her lay 400 years of American history in which a white woman would always be seen as the victim and a black man the aggressor.

Christian Cooper, the black birder, filmed the whole thing. He's alive; she got fired from her Wall Street job--a rare instance of justice. Nonetheless, in America you can be killed for driving while black, jogging while black, shopping while black, even sleeping while black. In March, Breonna Taylor, a medical technician in Louisville, Kentucky, was killed in her own bed by police using a battering ram to break into her home.

In normal times, back before we started hoarding hand-sanitiser and loo roll, if some atrocity--a school shooting, a terrorist bombing, a terrible storm--occurred, Americans could be certain their government would, at minimum, try to calm things down. George W Bush, rarely celebrated for his eloquence, won bi-partisan praise for his speech after al-Qaeda attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. When a white supremacist murdered nine black parishioners in a Charleston church, President Barack Obama sang "Amazing Grace" and spoke of forgiveness and love. A few days ago, Trump managed to express sympathy for Floyd's family, but then tweeted he'd be prepared to send in the army to quell American citizens, called protestors "thugs," and promised "when the looting starts, the shooting starts."

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