Said by a dying man in Minneapolis in May 2020 and the whole world stopped what it was doing. Murals went up overnight. Politicians who couldn’t find Minneapolis on a map were suddenly experts on American policing. Corporations that wouldn’t give a homeless man the time of day were putting black squares on their Instagram. Millions marched. Three words became a brand.
Then a man called Henry Nowak said the same words, dying, in Southampton. And nothing. No mural. No corporate statement. No politician taking the knee outside a Hampshire police station. Same words. Same fear in a man’s throat as the life goes out of him. Different universe of response. And before anyone tells me it’s because nobody saw it – they did. It was filmed. It was shared. People were angry about it, same as they were angry about Floyd. Questions got asked about what the police did and didn’t do. All the ingredients were there. The cake just never got baked.
So why not? The easy answer – the one that lets everybody off the hook – is that America has its own particular history, its own wound that never healed properly, and Floyd’s death just happened to land on the rawest part of it. Fine. There’s truth in that. But it’s not the whole truth, and I think most people sense that, even if they don’t say it out loud. The real question – the one that actually matters – isn’t about the dead men. It’s about us. What is it that decides whether a death becomes a movement or just a paragraph in a local paper? What decides whose anger gets taken seriously and whose gets a security briefing instead?
After Floyd, America burned in places. I’m not going to pretend otherwise – shops gutted, buildings on fire, people who had nothing to do with any of it losing their homes and their livelihoods, some losing their lives. That happened. But watch how it got talked about. The violence got wrapped in understanding. Commentators lined up to explain the rage behind it, to give it context, to humanise it. The disorder was treated as the unfortunate cousin of a legitimate grievance.
Now watch what happens in Britain, when ordinary people get angry about immigration, or about crime in their own streets, or about policing that doesn’t seem to apply equally to everyone. The vocabulary changes overnight. Suddenly we’re not talking about grievance and context – we’re talking about extremism, about racism, about the far right circling like vultures. Sometimes that label fits. Often it doesn’t. But notice the pattern – one crowd gets analysed, the other gets a label slapped on it and filed away. One crowd’s anger gets explored. The other’s gets assumed, and dismissed before the first sentence is finished.
People aren’t stupid. They see this. They see which causes get the politician’s knee and which get silence. They see which grief gets a hashtag and which gets a line in the local news and nothing more. They notice who becomes a symbol and who becomes a statistic, filed and forgotten. I’m not saying every protest is righteous, or every grievance equally sound – that would be its own kind of dishonesty. What I’m asking is simpler than that. If we say understanding matters, does it matter for everybody, or just the people whose anger fits the right story? If justice is the principle, does it apply when it’s inconvenient, or only when it’s fashionable?
Look at what happened after, too. In America, the machine moved. The officers were suspended, charged, tried, convicted. You can argue with bits of how that went, but nobody can say the state didn’t act. It showed its hand – police can be held to account, in public, with consequences.
Nobody in Britain is holding their breath for anything like that over Henry Nowak. There’ll be an investigation, there’ll be a statement, there’ll be the usual promises that lessons will be learned. And then there’ll be quiet. Not because the cases are identical – they’re not, no two ever are – but because nobody seriously expects the same ending. And that gap, between what one community expects from the system and what another expects, is its own kind of rot. Justice that only some people believe is coming for them isn’t justice. It’s a postcode lottery with better PR.
And here’s where it gets even messier, because the story doesn’t sit still long enough to be tidy. Tyre Nichols died in Memphis in January 2023, beaten by police officers – Black officers, beating a Black man – and the footage was as bad as anything that came out of Minneapolis. The state moved fast again. Sackings, charges, the lot. And the world barely blinked. No global wave. No summer of statements. The cameras packed up and went home quicker than anyone expected.
If it was really about police violence, why didn’t that case detonate the same way? If it was really about accountability, why did one tragedy become a chapter of history and the other a news cycle that came and went? Maybe America had already had its reckoning and didn’t have the appetite for a second one. Or maybe – and this is the bit that makes people uncomfortable – outrage isn’t really driven by the facts of what happened at all. It’s driven by whether the death fits a story that’s already being told. Some deaths slot neatly into the narrative everyone’s already arguing about. Others, just as brutal, don’t fit anywhere, and so they don’t go anywhere either.
Morgan Freeman has been saying some version of this for years, and it’s cost him plenty of goodwill with people who’d normally be cheering him on. Asked on 60 Minutes how you stop racism, he didn’t hedge – he said stop talking about it. Stop sorting people into categories and calling that progress. “I don’t want a Black History Month,” he told them. “Black history is American history.” He’s said much the same about being called African-American – he’s an American, full stop, and he doesn’t see why there has to be a hyphen in front of it. Predictably, he got hammered for it. Plenty of people argue the categories are necessary precisely because the inequalities are still there, baked into the structure, and pretending otherwise just makes the problem harder to name and fix. That’s not a daft argument. It deserves a proper answer, not a shrug.
But Freeman’s actual challenge still stands there waiting to be answered: if equal treatment is the principle, what happens to that principle the moment it depends on who’s asking for it? He’s not saying forget history. He’s saying a rule that bends depending on which group is in front of you isn’t a rule. It’s a preference wearing a rule’s clothes. Nobody needs convincing that George Floyd deserved sympathy. He did. Nobody needs convincing that Tyre Nichols deserved justice. He did. And nobody should need convincing that Henry Nowak’s death deserves a proper look too. It does.
The question that won’t go away is why these deaths land so differently. What decides which ones become a cause and which become a case file? Whose fury gets called righteous and whose gets called a problem to be managed? These aren’t comfortable questions, and I don’t pretend to have them fully worked out. But any society that claims to care about justice ought to be very wary of building a ladder of grief – some victims at the top, worth the world’s attention, others further down, worth a paragraph and a press release.
If police kill unlawfully, they should answer for it – wherever it happens, whoever they are. If a citizen dies after the state gets involved, that death deserves scrutiny, full stop, not scrutiny rationed out depending on the politics of the moment. And if justice is supposed to mean something, it has to mean the same thing on a wet Tuesday in Southampton as it does on a hot night in Minneapolis.
George Floyd’s last words became one of the slogans of this century. Henry Nowak’s last words didn’t become anything at all, beyond a paragraph most people scrolled past. That gap doesn’t tell us much about either man. It tells us about ourselves – about which stories we’re willing to pick up and carry, and which we let drop without a second thought. Freeman’s challenge is the same one sitting underneath all of this: are we actually willing to apply our principles to everyone, or only to the cases that are easy, fashionable, and don’t ask anything difficult of us?
Justice shouldn’t run on fashion. It shouldn’t run on which way the political wind’s blowing that week. The moment it starts picking favourites, it stops being justice and becomes something else entirely.
Then a man called Henry Nowak said the same words, dying, in Southampton. And nothing. No mural. No corporate statement. No politician taking the knee outside a Hampshire police station. Same words. Same fear in a man’s throat as the life goes out of him. Different universe of response. And before anyone tells me it’s because nobody saw it – they did. It was filmed. It was shared. People were angry about it, same as they were angry about Floyd. Questions got asked about what the police did and didn’t do. All the ingredients were there. The cake just never got baked.
So why not? The easy answer – the one that lets everybody off the hook – is that America has its own particular history, its own wound that never healed properly, and Floyd’s death just happened to land on the rawest part of it. Fine. There’s truth in that. But it’s not the whole truth, and I think most people sense that, even if they don’t say it out loud. The real question – the one that actually matters – isn’t about the dead men. It’s about us. What is it that decides whether a death becomes a movement or just a paragraph in a local paper? What decides whose anger gets taken seriously and whose gets a security briefing instead?
After Floyd, America burned in places. I’m not going to pretend otherwise – shops gutted, buildings on fire, people who had nothing to do with any of it losing their homes and their livelihoods, some losing their lives. That happened. But watch how it got talked about. The violence got wrapped in understanding. Commentators lined up to explain the rage behind it, to give it context, to humanise it. The disorder was treated as the unfortunate cousin of a legitimate grievance.
Now watch what happens in Britain, when ordinary people get angry about immigration, or about crime in their own streets, or about policing that doesn’t seem to apply equally to everyone. The vocabulary changes overnight. Suddenly we’re not talking about grievance and context – we’re talking about extremism, about racism, about the far right circling like vultures. Sometimes that label fits. Often it doesn’t. But notice the pattern – one crowd gets analysed, the other gets a label slapped on it and filed away. One crowd’s anger gets explored. The other’s gets assumed, and dismissed before the first sentence is finished.
People aren’t stupid. They see this. They see which causes get the politician’s knee and which get silence. They see which grief gets a hashtag and which gets a line in the local news and nothing more. They notice who becomes a symbol and who becomes a statistic, filed and forgotten. I’m not saying every protest is righteous, or every grievance equally sound – that would be its own kind of dishonesty. What I’m asking is simpler than that. If we say understanding matters, does it matter for everybody, or just the people whose anger fits the right story? If justice is the principle, does it apply when it’s inconvenient, or only when it’s fashionable?
Look at what happened after, too. In America, the machine moved. The officers were suspended, charged, tried, convicted. You can argue with bits of how that went, but nobody can say the state didn’t act. It showed its hand – police can be held to account, in public, with consequences.
Nobody in Britain is holding their breath for anything like that over Henry Nowak. There’ll be an investigation, there’ll be a statement, there’ll be the usual promises that lessons will be learned. And then there’ll be quiet. Not because the cases are identical – they’re not, no two ever are – but because nobody seriously expects the same ending. And that gap, between what one community expects from the system and what another expects, is its own kind of rot. Justice that only some people believe is coming for them isn’t justice. It’s a postcode lottery with better PR.
And here’s where it gets even messier, because the story doesn’t sit still long enough to be tidy. Tyre Nichols died in Memphis in January 2023, beaten by police officers – Black officers, beating a Black man – and the footage was as bad as anything that came out of Minneapolis. The state moved fast again. Sackings, charges, the lot. And the world barely blinked. No global wave. No summer of statements. The cameras packed up and went home quicker than anyone expected.
If it was really about police violence, why didn’t that case detonate the same way? If it was really about accountability, why did one tragedy become a chapter of history and the other a news cycle that came and went? Maybe America had already had its reckoning and didn’t have the appetite for a second one. Or maybe – and this is the bit that makes people uncomfortable – outrage isn’t really driven by the facts of what happened at all. It’s driven by whether the death fits a story that’s already being told. Some deaths slot neatly into the narrative everyone’s already arguing about. Others, just as brutal, don’t fit anywhere, and so they don’t go anywhere either.
Morgan Freeman has been saying some version of this for years, and it’s cost him plenty of goodwill with people who’d normally be cheering him on. Asked on 60 Minutes how you stop racism, he didn’t hedge – he said stop talking about it. Stop sorting people into categories and calling that progress. “I don’t want a Black History Month,” he told them. “Black history is American history.” He’s said much the same about being called African-American – he’s an American, full stop, and he doesn’t see why there has to be a hyphen in front of it. Predictably, he got hammered for it. Plenty of people argue the categories are necessary precisely because the inequalities are still there, baked into the structure, and pretending otherwise just makes the problem harder to name and fix. That’s not a daft argument. It deserves a proper answer, not a shrug.
But Freeman’s actual challenge still stands there waiting to be answered: if equal treatment is the principle, what happens to that principle the moment it depends on who’s asking for it? He’s not saying forget history. He’s saying a rule that bends depending on which group is in front of you isn’t a rule. It’s a preference wearing a rule’s clothes. Nobody needs convincing that George Floyd deserved sympathy. He did. Nobody needs convincing that Tyre Nichols deserved justice. He did. And nobody should need convincing that Henry Nowak’s death deserves a proper look too. It does.
The question that won’t go away is why these deaths land so differently. What decides which ones become a cause and which become a case file? Whose fury gets called righteous and whose gets called a problem to be managed? These aren’t comfortable questions, and I don’t pretend to have them fully worked out. But any society that claims to care about justice ought to be very wary of building a ladder of grief – some victims at the top, worth the world’s attention, others further down, worth a paragraph and a press release.
If police kill unlawfully, they should answer for it – wherever it happens, whoever they are. If a citizen dies after the state gets involved, that death deserves scrutiny, full stop, not scrutiny rationed out depending on the politics of the moment. And if justice is supposed to mean something, it has to mean the same thing on a wet Tuesday in Southampton as it does on a hot night in Minneapolis.
George Floyd’s last words became one of the slogans of this century. Henry Nowak’s last words didn’t become anything at all, beyond a paragraph most people scrolled past. That gap doesn’t tell us much about either man. It tells us about ourselves – about which stories we’re willing to pick up and carry, and which we let drop without a second thought. Freeman’s challenge is the same one sitting underneath all of this: are we actually willing to apply our principles to everyone, or only to the cases that are easy, fashionable, and don’t ask anything difficult of us?
Justice shouldn’t run on fashion. It shouldn’t run on which way the political wind’s blowing that week. The moment it starts picking favourites, it stops being justice and becomes something else entirely.
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| 🕮 Frankie McKillen is a Belfast Rockabilly |
