Shakespeare & the Death of George Floyd

How do we make sense of recent events in the US, after the death of George Floyd, held down by four cops, one kneeling on his neck for eight minutes?


[CNN photo]

Does Shakespeare matter, help, or get in the way at times as we strive to make sense of the unfolding chaos, of the actions of provocateurs, the violence of the police and national guard against peaceful protesters?

I'd like to offer a brief account of my understanding of the context, and then just a few insights from a handful of Shakespeare's plays, not an exhaustive list.

[Note: I am not observing "Blackout Tuesday" in part because some have criticized it for being counter-productive at a time when people in the US should have access to information and discussion of current events, but I don't criticize or judge anyone who observes it due to their own convictions.]


GEORGE FLOYD IN CONTEXT
George Floyd was accused of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. We don’t know if in fact it was counterfeit, or if he knew that it may have been and was intentionally trying to pass it as real.

But we do know that many white folks who have done the same have not had their necks knelt on for 8 minutes by a cop, while three other cops hold them down.

And we know that cops who break the law involving $20 worth of property don’t routinely have their necks knelt on for 8 minutes by a cop, while three other cops hold them down.

A hugely disproportionate number of deaths of civilians at the hands of police are of people of color: It does not at all match the proportion of the population represented by people of color in the US. A recent Washington Post article noted that in the US, blacks are killed by police at a rate of 30 per million; hispanics are killed at a rate of 22 per million; while whites are killed at a rate of 12 per million.



At this point, the protests and violence that is shaking so many US cities is no longer merely about the death of George Floyd because of police brutality. People are fed up with police violence against people of color. People are fed up with the disparities between people of color and whites, between rich and poor (in the US, disparity between rich and poor is greater than any other developed nation). People are fed up with Trump and the way that his administration and the GOP-controlled US Senate, during the COVID-19 crisis, have acted more in the interests of Wall Street and the rich than in the interests of the average citizen, while the poor and people of color suffer disproportionately from the health- and economic effects of the pandemic.

Trump has had a long history of racism (as documented in part by this Atlantic Monthly piece), and his racist rhetoric seems to make people who hear it more prejudiced (as documented by Brookings.edu). He was elected by slightly more than a quarter of eligible voters in an election with only 55 percent voter turnout, many displeased with both of the major Presidential candidates).



Van Jones, on CNN election night, called Trump's victory a "white lash," with all the implications of the whipping of slaves.

So people are not only fed up with racism and police violence against people of color, but also with a president elected by a small sub-section of the US.

JAMES BALDWIN ON LOOTING
We've seen riots and violence, especially at night, claimed to be associated with the protests that are often mostly very peaceful during the day. It may seem counter-intuitive that people would protest or riot during a pandemic, but many are unemployed and out of school, looking for outlets for their frustration.

Sometimes video and photos of looters get more attention than peaceful protests: The 25% of Americans who elected Trump would certainly rather view Black Lives Matter protesters as looters than as peaceful protesters.

But James Baldwin made an interesting statement on looting in a 1968 interview in Esquire magazine: He said,

"The mass media-television and all the major news agencies-endlessly use that word "looter." On television you always see black hands reaching in, you know. And so the American public concludes that these savages are trying to steal everything from us, And no one has seriously tried to get where the trouble is. After all, you're accusing a captive population who has been robbed of everything of looting. I think it's obscene."

PROVOCATEURS: THINGS ARE OFTEN NOT WHAT THEY SEEM
But complicating matters regarding looting is the presence of provocateurs among the looters. In Minneapolis, a white man wearing all black, with a gas mask, a hood, and an umbrella.

[Image via Essence Magazine]

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison commented in a tweet,


Others have noted that right-wing groups (one calling themselves "Boogaloo Boys") have been planning a violent uprising and may be using the protests to cover for their violent actions, hoping the violence will be blamed on Black Lives Matter protesters. (Some were recently charged: See this article.)

The New York Times recently ran a story about Erik Prince, brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and CEO of the private security force firm Blackwater, has been recruiting people to infiltrate liberal groups. An organization such as Erik Prince's would certainly have the ability to recruit and train provocateurs such as these.

In the minds of a great deal of the public, the common assumption is that the looting and rioting is being done by Black Lives Matter protesters. But in fact, a great deal of the violence might be done by, or started by, white supremacist provocateurs who do not wish to see progress in the US on civil rights.

WHAT ABOUT SHAKESPEARE?
Many may note that the world has bigger things to think about than Shakespeare. Shakespeare studies were long dominated by white men who tended to whitewash the accepted view of the age, omitting consideration of people of color as insignificant, until scholars of color began raising new questions.

More basically, the texts of Shakespeare's plays and the way they have been performed have often showed many signs of prejudice:
- Many cite The Merchant of Venice as an anti-Semitic play for its treatment of Shylock, and in that same play, Portia reviewing her suitors displays surprising prejudice that, in the eyes of many, could be read as pandering to English stereotypes about foreigners.
- Othello may contribute to stereotypes about black men as violence-prone and "stealing" the daughters of white men (who, too often, treat daughters like property). In the end, he is deceived into questioning his wife's fidelity, and he kills her.
- Especially in the first two centuries after Othello was written and first performed, Othello the Moor was played more often by white men in blackface, and the practice continued well into the 20th century, in spite of the fact that there are many excellent actors who are people of color. (See this link for a podcast from the Folger Shakespeare Library on Othello and blackface.)
- Comparing his uncle to his dead father, Hamlet uses language of classical gods to describe the dead King Hamlet, but he calls his uncle Claudius a "Moor" (3.4.2451).
- In The Tempest, it could be argued that Prospero is as brutal to Caliban as some slave-owners would have been if a slave looked the wrong way at their daughter. Does Shakespeare portray Caliban more as a savage than as a noble savage, and is the play therefore irredeemably racist to modern ears? * (See "Caliban Never Belonged to Shakespeare" at Lithub.com).

Can such plays, or other works of Shakespeare, really offer anything to help race relations?

OTHELLO
Macbeth and Othello seem to be two plays of Shakespeare that use as their main characters soldiers who (like many police officers in the US) may be military veterans who are scarred by PTSD. Both acclaimed soldiers seem stuck in warrior-mode (perhaps like too many of the police and National Guard called upon to keep the peace during protests), thinking too much in terms of adversarial relationships. The "Moor" Othello is in many ways an honorable character who was used as a warrior by the state when it was convenient, but who is misled by a white man into killing his own wife.

In this play, Iago is the self-appointed provocateur who deceives Othello.

In the US, for centuries, people of color have been deceived, told that rights are "equal" and that all are equally protected under the same laws. They've been told that the mission of police is to serve and protect. But these ideals have not been true to their experience.

So I am comfortable claiming that Othello still has light to shed on current events.

SHYLOCK ON SLAVES 
Shylock is clearly a villain in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, but curiously, he becomes the vehicle by which we are given a critique of slave-owners:

You have among you many a purchased slave,
Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules,
You use in abject and in slavish parts,
Because you bought them: shall I say to you,
Let them be free, marry them to your heirs?
Why sweat they under burthens? let their beds
Be made as soft as yours and let their palates
Be season'd with such viands? You will answer
'The slaves are ours:' so do I answer you.
(4.1.2022-30, OpenSourceShakespeare)

 "The slaves are ours," to do with as slave-owners please, and for this reason, Shylock claims the pound of flesh is his, his due.

Notice: Shylock's analogy compares slave-owning to his claim that he owns a pound of Antonio's flesh.

This should be a repulsive idea. And yet slave owners in the Confederate South owned and read the works of Shakespeare; what mental gymnastics did it take for them to dismiss the implications of this speech?

In fact, the Folger Theater in Washington, D.C. (associated with the Folger Shakespeare Library) produced an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice in 2016 called District Merchants, which re-imagined the play as set in post-Civil War USA, and which explored a wide range of issues.


No one should own another human being. And yet slavery is part of the legacy that has led us here, to protests and riots after the death of George Floyd; some work for a deep and lasting change, and for equal rights, while others resist in the name of the status quo and of law and order. 

So I am comfortable claiming that The Merchant of Venice still has light to shed on current events.

MURDER AND ABUSE OF POWER
Perhaps two Shakespeare plays that powerfully demonstrate murder in the abuse of power are Richard III and Macbeth.  In Richard III, Richard arranges for the killing of the two princes in The Tower of London, young Edward V and his younger brother, the Duke of York. The play is not meant to be historically accurate, but portrays the abuse of power by a tyrant.

In Macbeth, Lady Macduff and her son are killed on orders from Macbeth. It is one of the more touching scenes in the play, in part because Lady Macduff claims to have given up hope in her husband, yet her son debates and humors her with his wit, just before they are both killed.

In both plays, powerful men who should have acted to protect the weak end up using their power in selfish and violent ways that cost the lives of people under their protection.

Which is exactly the case in the killing of George Floyd by police, as well as many other people of color killed by police, and the racist and violence-inciting remarks of Trump, and the deaths of many immigrants during his term, to name just a few such crimes. People with a great deal of power, charged to protect and serve, abused that power, and people died.

The Tempest in some ways seems a quite racist play in its treatment of Caliban, and Prospero, who carries resentment over his own mistreatment, mistreats others as well. But the point is not that Prospero is a hero, unblemished throughout; rather, the point is that he has a character arc too, and in the end, he must relinquish his book and his powers. In the end, we all die, we all must surrender the powers we have used and sometimes abused.

So I am comfortable claiming that Richard III, Macbeth, and The Tempest" still have light to shed on current events.

IMMIGRANTS GO HOME? THE STRANGER'S CASE
Sometimes the xenophobic cry of tyrants like Trump, and of his "Make America Great Again" followers, is that immigrants should go home. Ironic, given that Native Americans could (and sometimes do) suggest the same of white Americans. Ironic, too, when most African-Americans are descendants of slaves who were captured and brought to the US against their will.

Many descendants of slaves in the US have older roots in this country than my own: Most of my ancestors migrated to the US from Germany only not long before 1900. And yet I am white and enjoy many privileges, I am not racially profiled or discriminated against because of the color of my skin, I don't feel unsafe when the police pull me over for a broken tail-light or forgetting to turn off my high beams. So if we line up to go back to our ancestral homes in the order of which we arrived, I'd have to leave earlier than many black US citizens descended from slaves, and certainly before those descended from Native Americans.

A great deal of the western US was part of Mexico and only purchased after the US provoked war with Mexico in a land grab now called the Mexican-American war, when a US president lied to congress and said American blood had been shed on American soil. In fact it was in a provocation in disputed territory between the Nueces and Rio Grande Rivers (and then-freshman representative Abe Lincoln criticized the president for his lies in what is now called "The Spot Resolutions"). So in essence, the same could be said of many of many Latino/a US citizens: Much of the US belonged to their ancestors more than mine.

Since at least 2013, a number of fine videos have been made of actors reading "The Stranger's Case," a speech from The Book of Sir Thomas More, to which Shakespeare contributed most of the pro-migrant speech. The play was banned in Shakespeare's lifetime, but it still speaks powerfully, asking the listener to put themselves in the place of the foreigner:

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another….
Say now the king
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbour? go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? this is the strangers case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.

Ian McKellen gave numerous performances of this speech, one of which you may find here, including an introduction in which he mentions Apartheid and a famous visit of Nelson Mandela, as well as the historical context of the speech (you can read more about that here):



Now the world witnesses the "mountainish inhumanity" of Trump, of predatory capitalism, and of certain racist police, and of certain National Guard members, many of whom might be more inclined to violence toward protesters out of fear, or merely to obey orders, rather than inclined toward marching in peaceful solidarity with them.

We must work to change that.

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* I'm grateful to a member of the Facebook forum, "Shakespeare and Early Modern Friends," for comments along these lines early Wednesday morning. If she gives permission for me to quote her directly and name her, I will add it later.
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Quotes from Shakespeare's plays are taken from InternetShakespeare, courtesy of the University of Victoria in Canada, and as noted, from OpenSourceShakespeare.
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Disclaimer: By noting bible passages in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over any other, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to point out how the Bible may have influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html

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