COMPLAINTS about police brutality in the US are an everyday occurrence. So are shootings and violence in the big cities. But it takes something extra special for the country to erupt into one of its sporadic outbreaks of rioting.

The horrific video of a man’s life being squeezed out by a white knee on his black neck was by degrees powerful and symbolic. It pushed people over the edge.

The rioting and looting that followed were inevitable, just as they were during the Civil Rights era of the 60s, then when Rodney King was savagely beaten by police in 1991, and more recently when the killer of teenager Trayvon Martin was acquitted of murder.

This time round Phoenix, Arizona, where I now live, had its share of protests. Black Lives Matter protesters mixed with armed white vigilantes. A few high-end stores were looted but the situation was generally well policed.

Now the victim, George Floyd, has been laid to rest in Texas; the country is calming down; the rioters dispersing. What now? Will anything change?

There have been a few kneejerk reactions. One police authority has suggested disarming officers. But how do you disarm police when the rest of the population can pick up a gun and ammunition at a yard sale?

Glasgow Times:

Perhaps the national debate now ongoing will bring about some changes for the better.

The reality, however, is that things will gradually get back to normal. And that’s the problem. Normality in the United States means deep-seated racism, it has done for generations. It is called America’s “original sin” and no amount of tinkering around the edges will end it.

The American Football season will soon be with us and men watching the games at home and in bars will marvel at the speed of the “monkeys” as they run in touchdowns – and no-one will bat an eyelid when they utter the term.

Even in the 21st century, racism bleeds from America’s pores. It doesn’t mean that every American is a racist – far from it. But racial division is rooted in the country’s fabric; it is part of the national psyche. It has been from the very beginning when white men brought slaves to the colonies.

In the mid-1700s there were more negro slaves in the Carolinas than white citizens. The entire culture and economy of what became the United States was built on the belief that Black people were inferior in every way to their white “masters”.

A pre-Civil War “slave census” form carried the name of the slave owner, then a list of nameless negroes, with only their age and gender to distinguish them. In the “chattel society” that existed, they were regarded the same as horses and cattle.

When Texas ceded from the Union before the Civil War, one of its reasons for doing so was that the state had been created “exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity”.

The Texas document added: “The African race ... were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.”

In other words, Blacks in America could only ever be slaves.

Glasgow Times: George Floyd protests

Fast forward 250 years and the wording in the Texas document resonates with the current-day Ku Klux Klan and the myriad other white supremacist groups in the country.

A lot may have changed but a lot has stayed the same.

So how will the protests over George Floyd’s death, and the smashing of a pizza shop’s windows in downtown Phoenix, change what is an accepted American way of life? Most realists would agree that no amount of cosmetic change will ever unravel what has been the norm here for centuries.

I’d love to be proved wrong. But I believe George Floyd’s death will go down in the history books not as a game changer but as just another statistic.