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The image of a Black man is a Rorschach test that America repeatedly fails.
There is no official wrong answer when taking a Rorschach test; its purpose is more to glean what your perceptions reveal about you as a human being. But in America, negative perceptions of Black men work like a trick question that police officers all too often get wrong—to devastating effect. It's a crucial yet under-covered piece of what happened between Derek Chauvin and George Floyd.
On Tuesday, Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer and white man, was convicted of the second and third degree murder and second degree manslaughter of George Floyd, a Black man choked to death by Chauvin's knee. But beyond Chauvin's disregard for Floyd's basic humanity, it seems to me that Chauvin defaulted to a pervasive negative image of Black men in his judgement of Floyd during the arrest which ultimately resulted in Floyd's murder.
We know that at least from the perspective of a former boss, Chauvin was uncomfortable around Black people. Chauvin worked at a Latin nightclub, the El Nuevo Rodeo club, providing off-duty security for over 17 years. Ironically, Floyd, too, worked at the club, though it's doubtful the men knew each other. But the former owner of the club recalled Chauvin resorting to "overkill" measures when it came to Black clientele.
"He would mace everyone instead of apprehending the people who were fighting," Maya Santamaria, former owner of El Nuevo Rodeo club, told reporters. "He would call backup. The next thing you would know, there would be five or six squad cars." As Santamaria explained to CNN, "I noticed that he got very anxious when there was urban night with a lot of African American people, as did many other officers. He was certainly not the only one."
For 17 years, Santamaria had the chance to observe Chauvin working as an off-duty police officer at her establishment, and that is what she surmised from his behavior: He viewed Black people, especially Black men, as a unique threat to be put down.
It helps explain why Chauvin felt the need to treat Floyd with so much aggressiveness. Though Floyd spent the majority of the encounter crying, pleading, doing his best to comply, responding immediately to the police, and generally just trying to stay alive, Chauvin treated him like he was an uncontrollable Black man. In other words, Floyd was for Chauvin a Rorschach test that he interpreted as a unique threat that had to be aggressively taken down.
This is not what George Floyd was. He was a human being who needed oxygen and compassion, as the prosecution in Chauvin's trial pointed out. And yet, as Floyd called out for his mother, as the life drained out of him, Chauvin continued to see him as a threat, never once moving to remove his knee from Floyd's back.
Chauvin is not the first white man to see Black men through this racist lens. Throughout history, Black men—whether tall, short, skinny or strong—were viewed as an imposing threat, a walking, breathing Rorschach test for a society struggling to see Black people as fully human.
And this persists today. I've worked at some of the most prestigious schools in the country, and I can tell you firsthand that the bigotry Black men face cuts across socioeconomic strata.
As a head college administrator at one of the premier liberal arts colleges in the country, I was detained by a campus police officer after a caller reported seeing a "suspiciously well-dressed black man lurking" around the side of one the main athletic center. On that day, I was wearing a solid dark grey Jones New York three-piece suit with a most fashionable English gentleman's scarf, and a dress coat.
The officer looked squarely at me and asked for my identification. I was dismayed at the irony of what I was currently experiencing, but I obliged. I showed the officer my identification. I then made the long walk back to my office.
No matter my level of education or authority, I was still just a Black man, still America's threat.
James C. Onwuachi is a theologian, an Upper School Dean at The Kinkaid School in Texas, and a doctoral candidate at Vanderbilt University.
The views in this article are the author's own.
