On Monday, right-wing political activist Candace Owens took aim at George Floyd, the unarmed Black American killed by police officer Derek Chauvin, whose murder sparked global protests against racism. In a video viewed more than six million times on [YouTube]((https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtPfoEvNJ74&t=299s) and over 90 million times on Facebook, Owens declared that Floyd was neither a “martyr or a hero... [he] had drugs on him, was using counterfeit bills, and was high.” According to Owens, Black Americans are “the only community that will get outraged… and protest to defend the bottom denominator of our community, meaning criminals, burglars, robbers, criminals.”

Owens emphasized that Floyd ran with a bad crowd, and implied that he experienced a confrontation with the police that was inevitable in a life filled with crime and illegal drug use. But this argument ignores both the indisputable reality of racist police violence, as well as the institutional disadvantages experienced by people of color in the United States.

Floyd was born in 1973, and grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Houston, Texas. He was raised in a single-parent household, alongside four other siblings and was the first of them to be able to afford higher education, made possible in-part by an athletic scholarship. In university, he met professional sports player Stephen Jackson, who later remarked, “If George would have had more opportunities, he might have been a pro athlete.” The first portion of Floyd’s life represents an attempt to triumph over one symptom of systematic racial discrimination in the U.S.: the wealth gap.

According to The Brookings Institution, the net worth of a typical white family is 171,050 USD, that of Black families is just 17,150 USD, nearly 10 times less. Part of this difference is attributed to discriminatory policies that hindered economic growth for Black communities in earlier decades. According to economists Darrick Hamilton and Sandy Darity, intergenerational transfers “account for more of the racial wealth gap than any other demographic and socioeconomic indicators.”

Owens did not address this, and instead categorized activists’ work as “turning villains into heroes overnight.” This description avoids engaging with the actual grievances felt by Black Americans about systemic inequality, and forces public attention towards Floyd’s police record. The economic hardship that hindered education for Floyd’s siblings is experienced by Black people across the country, and the more difficult access to upper education harms the possibility of closing the racial wealth gap in the future, a reality that makes it more and more likely Black people will have to pursue illegal methods of income accumulation.

Floyd returned from college in 1995 and became an automotive customizer while simultaneously performing as “Big Floyd” in an influential Houston hip-hop group known as “Screwed up Click.” These successes however, were accompanied by a string of arrests in his 20s, mostly for non-violent offenses. One arrest was over a “$10 drug deal… [which] cost [Floyd] ten months in a state jail.” Non-violent marks on previously-clean records severely hinder hiring and upward economic mobility prospects for many Black Americans, within the United States, and abroad.

Despite similar rates of usage, a 2018 analysis of drug-related arrest records showed that Black people were “Four times as likely as white people to be arrested for marijuana possession… and five times as likely to be arrested for felony possession.”

This is another reality not examined by Owens’ video, in which she went on to list his offenses and stints in prison. This once again shifts the narrative to focus on negative aspects of Floyd’s life, while avoiding the issues raised by Black Lives Matter protests, such as the symptoms of institutional racism: those that confine Black Americans to a life of petty crime and punishes them with higher rates of arrests and convictions than white people, even for the exact same crime.

On May 25 2020, Floyd was arrested by four police officers after being accused of using a $20 counterfeit bill. He was later killed by officer Derek Chauvin who restrained him alongside Tou Thao. Chauvin pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, the last three of which Floyd was motionless without a pulse. Following Floyd’s death, police records released inaccurate and misleading reports, including a fabricated autopsy that claimed the death was the result of drug-use and a pre-existing heart condition. This was not proven false until the Floyd family funded a second autopsy that identified that the true cause of death was “consistent with mechanical asphyxia” caused by neck, lung, and chest compressions that dangerously restricted air flow.

In her video, Owens followed her description of Floyd with a take-down of what she called the “myth” of police brutality. “I will be damned if the rest of us upstanding Black citizens have to suffer because of an instance that rarely ever happens in America,” she declared. Her statement directly contradicts the overwhelming consensus from researchers and academics confirming the reality of police brutality disproportionately affecting Black Americans. According to a study from Rutgers University’s School of Criminal Justice “in the U.S., African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white people.” Recent FBI data confirms these findings, as Black people account for 31 percent of police killing victims while making up just 13 percent of the United States. This increased death rate is both the result of police officer’s bias that may make them more likely to kill a Black target, but it is also the result of the inconceivability of upward mobility in the wake of the legal system’s treatment of ex-offenders.

George Floyd was a victim of a vicious cycle. After being arrested, his ability to earn a living became limited as an ex-offender, a reality that may have contributed to him being desperate enough to make money through crime. This in turn increased the risk of police confrontation that ultimately led to his death. His experience is not much different from that of many other low income Black people, except that when a Black person does not die after a confrontation with the police officer, the vicious cycle of criminality and increased possibility of future police confrontation continues with each arrest, as potential job prospects diminish more and more, and Black America is forced to resort to petty crime.

Owens’ description of the incident ignored the harsh reality of structural racism. In stressing that “Black communities commit a disproportionate amount of the crimes… [and] police officers have way more to fear than the other way around,” she ignored both the racist society that distorts arrest and incarceration numbers through higher conviction rates for similar rates of crime, as well as the conditions poor Black America has been confined to, that may make it more likely to commit illegal acts. By focusing on demonizing Floyd, Owens both disregarded how outside conditions colored his experience, and overlooked the fact that the protests have never been solely about him in the first place.

George Floyd’s life was determined, from start to end, by structural racism. Where every success was an impressive escape from an upbringing stained by inequality and legal discrimination, and every failure snowballed into making his escape from poverty more and more improbable. George Floyd should be viewed as a proxy for how structural racism treats Black Americans throughout their life. How it confines the Black experience to poverty and petty crime, and how it punishes and often kills Black Americans for existing in a society built on the backs of our oppression.