A Knee to the Neck

Well, Derek Chauvin is guilty. It wasn’t the drugs that killed George Floyd. It was Chauvin’s knee.

I know what it’s like to have someone kneel on your neck. Back in school I was one of the smallest people in the year. That plus memory difficulties and a somewhat erratic personality all made me, it’s safe to say, a target. I think I was in maybe 4^th year, trying to mix in with people, and I approached this group of lads. Some of them were in a few classes I had. The biggest of the group (and one of the biggest in the school, now I think about it), we’ll call him DJ, he was in a few of my classes. He had special needs of some kind- he wasn’t the brightest and his behaviour was somewhat odd. He didn’t speak often and when he did it was a hodge-podge of comedic insults and film quotes (sound familiar?!). We both got extra time on exams, and occasionally the odd differentiated paper.

I remember one particular lunchtime, for no reason at all, he threw me to the floor and kneeled on my neck. I must have been on my side, as it wasn’t my windpipe he was crushing: it was the jugular. I could feel myself going faint, sound fading out, seeing stars. He got off eventually and I walked off.

You’d think I’d go straight to the headteacher and say ‘someone just tried to kill me.’ But I didn’t. By that time, my experience of grassing people up was that teachers found reasons to blame the victim, and turn it around to make me the troublemaker. When you’ve got memory difficulties, recounting exactly what happened is a challenge, and usually has minimal payoff. It’s not so easy to defend yourself verbally or physically.

Maybe around 10 years ago, I added DJ on Facebook. He was big into his weightlifting. I remember doing weight training with him in PE. He could lift a lot at 14. His Facebook, well, his statuses were characteristically weird. He had a girlfriend, but he’d write what appeared to be sexual comments about the comic book character Bane, who was addicted to steroids. I think I unsubscribed from him not long after adding him. I don’t think we spoke.

Last November, I saw a post on a school group on Facebook telling us he’d passed away in his sleep. No other details known.

As for Derek Chauvin, he kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for a lot longer than DJ did on mine. We do know the details of Floyd’s death: asphyxiation.

I don’t want to sound like a hypocrite- I’ve quite vocally condemned the Black Lives Matter protests in the UK, just like I’ve condemned every protest that has occurred since March last year. I don’t believe anyone should gather in large numbers for anything during a pandemic and a lockdown. I also fail to see what protesting in the UK is going to do to change American attitudes and behaviours. They have a huge gun problem. We banned our guns after one school shooting. Surely that legislature was a thousand times more powerful than any number of protests. Bear in mind the only black person killed by British police in recent years was Mark Duggan, and he was walking the streets with an automatic handgun. He had it coming. But let’s not digress.

I watched the Chauvin trial. By the end of it, the only person who thought he would get away with it was Chauvin himself. His darting eyes, more noticeable above a white facemask, gave away the moment he realised he was wrong. The moment the custody officer leant him forward and applied the handcuffs.