One aspect of the Derek Chauvin verdicts in the murder of George Floyd that people fail to see is how there’s justice in diversity—if you let diversity work.
I caught the verdicts while livestreaming. All I could hear were the key words: “ Guilty….Guilty….Guilty.”
An astonishing triplet.
A cop lost in court. You could hear the relief of an entire nation. Few were confident of the outcome. But I was hopeful, because of the absence of a long-standing enemy of justice: The all-white jury.
There’s no more feared phrase among civil rights activists and lawyers. But that’s not what Minnesota gave us in the Derek Chauvin trial.
The jury that decided the fate of Chauvin, the white officer who had his knee on the neck of a Black man, George Floyd, was more diverse than the Minnesota county where the trial was held. That made the actual odds of getting justice a lot higher than anyone could have imagined.
Minnesota’s Hennepin County has 1.3 million people, according to Census data from 2019. The racial breakdown is 74.2 percent are white, 13.8 percent Black, 7.5 percent Asian, 7 percent Latino, 3.3 percent biracial, 1.1 percent Native American.
