On May 25, 2020, Derek Chauvin, a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, murdered George Floyd, who was Black. I do not use the term “murder” lightly. I’ve seen the footage. It is absolutely horrific. While Floyd, unarmed and in handcuffs, repeatedly gasps for air and repeats that he cannot breathe, the officer uses his knee to apply pressure to Floyd’s neck with the full weight of his body. According to a criminal complaint filed by the Hennepin County District Attorney, Chauvin sustains this hold for an agonizing 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

Eight minutes and 46 seconds.

Floyd’s pleas for the officer to spare his life are heart-wrenching. Bystanders beg for the officer to release him. Even when Floyd becomes unresponsive, the officer keeps his knee on Floyd’s neck for another 2 minutes and 53 seconds. How long does it take to notice that the person you are pinning down has ceased to fight back, to call for help, to gasp for breath? What about the other officers who are there, holding his legs, watching, while he is being killed, doing nothing to prevent his death?

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The lack of concern for a life being taken is shocking. The indifference is as unsettling as the images of white people smiling as Black bodies hang from trees in the background. Those iconic images were taken by Lawrence Beitler in 1930.

This is 2020.

How can such horrifying actions materialize from a call to the police about someone allegedly paying with a fake $20 bill?

A $20 bill. An iced tea and a pack of Skittles. Cigarillos and soda. A wallet. Cigarettes. A toy gun. A cell phone. A cosplay sword. A rifle that only fires pellets. A backpack. Loud music. A parking spot.

If you are Black, these are the things that can get you killed.

In the last few days, many in the media, seeking confirmation of their views, have proffered the following observation: “What is happening right now is horrible, isn’t it?”

Do they mean the interminable brutalizing and killing of Black lives by law enforcement, or are they referring to the protests, and ensuing destruction, in response to this horror?

If you have read about George Floyd, Jermaine Carby, Abdirahman Abdi, D’Andre Campbell, Machuar Madut, Nicholas Gibbs, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Jr., and the thousands of other unarmed black and brown people who have been killed or brutalized by law enforcement in Canada and the United States over the years, if you watch the footage from many of these murders, if you examine the copious facts and still argue that the response to these deaths — the protests and rage that often ensues — is not warranted, there is a good chance that your privilege prevents you from understanding the frustration that stems from an unrelenting system that condones, devalues, oppresses, and disposes of, Black lives.

Recall that Eric Garner’s death, in 2014, was also caught on videotape. He was also killed by a white police officer. He also died as a result of extreme pressure applied to his neck. He also cried “I can’t breathe” in the final moments of his life. Indeed, the deaths of Garner and Floyd are so eerily similar, equally unnecessary, easily avoidable that today, in a surreal repetition of events, those same final words are being used as a rallying call for racial justice and opposition to police brutality.

The chokehold used by the police officer that killed Garner had been banned by the New York Police Department. The New York City Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Garner’s death a homicide. The officer, Daniel Pantaleo, choked Garner with enough force to cause hemorrhaging in his neck. The report noted that the chokehold set off the asthma attack that ultimately killed him. In other words, he would not have died without the officer’s arm around his neck. All of that, and Pantaleo was not even indicted, never mind found guilty of a crime. And he kept his job, continuing to work for the NYPD up until he was fired in August 2019 — five years after he killed Garner. When he made the announcement of Pantaleo’s termination, New York City’s police commissioner, James O’Neill, explained that the decision was “difficult.”

Pantaleo. Wilson. Loehmann. Zimmerman (who auctioned off the gun he used to kill Trayvon Martin, and later sued the family of the unarmed teenager he shot and killed).

These deaths, and the impunity for those responsible that often follows, is an example of the biopolitical concept of disposability, a closely linked by-product of capitalism. Just like the images of black and brown bodies floating in the floodwaters of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina “reveal and shatter the conservative fiction of living in a colour-blind society,” as scholar Henry Giroux wrote, so do the images of American cities on fire and the copious videos of police brutality. The post-racial myth is revealed for the lie that it is again and again. Every act of violence by law enforcement peels away the veneer of equality, civility and respectability that has accreted over time.

Instead, what becomes glaringly apparent in the wake of these killings of unarmed Black men and women is that white supremacy is alive and well, fundamentally comprising the core of perpetually failing institutions. This cannot be fought with the politics of respectability. Author Michelle Smith, writing about affect and respectability, notes that “those who call for ‘calm’ in the wake of police murders of unarmed blacks apparently seek to contain or at the very least discipline black outrage in order to cultivate the familiar moral conditions for political progress.”

Respectability becomes a code word for complacency and submission. Respectability allows white supremacy to flourish unimpeded. Historically, respectability has not ended violence against people of colour. It has not diminished incidents of police brutality. It has not ended the killing of unarmed black and brown folks. It has not ceased the invoking of Blackness as a crime, nor weakened the potency of white privilege. We ignore this reality at our own peril. In an interview given in 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. observed, “I contend that the cry of ‘black power’ is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.”

Presciently, Dr. King warned against respectability, especially when espoused by well-meaning white folks. In fact, in his famous Letter From a Birmingham Jail he was unabashedly critical of those who preached respectability:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace–which is the absence of tension–to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’

When the system that kills you does not change; when white supremacy continues to threaten the lives of your children and loved ones; when legitimate non-violent, anti-racist movements spring up and are then surveilled, vilified and discredited; when National Security Advisors deny the existence of systemic racism; when law enforcement purposely drive into a crowd of people protesting police brutality; when your own president calls you a “thug” and sends in the army to shoot you; when you beg and cry out in agony that you can’t breathe, but the system keeps choking you, what other options are there?

Paul Di Stefano is an educator, activist and researcher from Montreal, Canada.