A Cellphone Was the Only Hero at George Floyd's Murder
Candace Owens, the Black conservative commentator, was right when she said that George Floyd is no hero. He isn’t. But our digital age certainly made him a martyr. It was the cell phone video captured by 17-year-old high school student Darnella Frazier that served as incontrovertible evidence of Floyd’s slaughter and sparked the process of converting a struggling, middle-aged addict with a prison record into a symbol, a touchstone, an icon, his name recited by children in classrooms, his face painted in colorful tribute on city walls, his soul prayed for in churches, synagogues, and mosques the world over. We almost didn’t need to wait for the wheels of justice to turn. Derek Chauvin’s fate, at least in the court of public opinion, was sealed the moment that Frazier aimed her camera at him, confirming the cell phone camera as society’s newest surveillance tool, one capable of exposing all manner of injustice, whether that be an overzealous security guard at a strip club or a police officer committing murder on a Minneapolis street.
Once her name was known, Frazier, too, was being hailed for her courage, her own GoFundMe page raising over half a million dollars to provide “peace and healing” for the trauma brought on by what she had witnessed and for the continuing trauma from the digital age’s unique form of insults and threats, which she endured long afterward. “It’s been nights I stayed up apologizing and apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more,” she said, “and not physically interacting and not saving his life.” And what a modern thought that is, that somehow the camera was an agent to the crime. In the age of the cyberwarrior, it’s hard to be a truth teller.
But let’s be clear: Floyd did not act the hero here. In fact, he was brutally acted upon. And Frazier’s presence at this historic moment was an accident. She was there to accompany her nine-year-old cousin, who wanted snacks from Cup Foods but was too young to go on her own. It took presence of mind for her to point her cell phone camera at the scene, while she, along with a small sidewalk crowd, scolded the police for what they were doing. And it took a steely perseverance for her to continue to point the camera while she watched a man die before her very eyes.