By now, you've probably seen or heard about Candace Owens' viral video about George Floyd. In a livestream with more than 4.3 million views and 100,000 likes on Twitter, Owens effectively argues that Floyd "is neither a martyr nor a hero" given his extensive criminal history involving cocaine, heroin, and possession of an unlicensed firearm.
Wait, I'm sorry.
That's not George Floyd's rap sheet; it's Robert Downey Jr.'s. Somehow, in Owens' world, you cannot be a hero if you're a criminal, but you can be a superhero who's the lead in three of the top 10 grossing films of all time, including the top film, Avengers: Endgame.
Perhaps, though, you're not a fan of superheroes. You might be a fan of Tim Allen, held up by conservatives as a martyr for political correctness when ABC canceled his hit show Last Man Standing, allegedly due to his public support of Trump. Allen is also a felon who spent years in federal prison for drug trafficking.
Ignoring these examples, Owens is very concerned about what she calls "the bottom denominator of our community, meaning criminals, burglars, robbers." This type of attitude is pervasive within American society. In fact, it is perhaps the last remaining form of publicly endorsed discrimination.
If members of a race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation were denied the ability to vote, to work certain jobs, or live certain places, there would be outrage from at least one if not both sides of the aisle. When the same thing happens to criminals, most Americans think it's justified.
Our language itself fully endorses the discrimination. For instance, if you are biased on the basis of race, you're a racist; if you're biased on the basis of sex, you're a sexist. What's the word for a person biased against criminals? There's not one because we assume that's how everyone believes.
Our media reflects this as well. Think of your favorite prison movie. Maybe you're a fan of The Shawshank Redemption or the more recent Just Mercy. One thing you'll notice about almost every prison film is that the protagonist is not guilty. Even prison movies don't make heroes of criminals, just the wrongfully accused.
Our bias against criminals is not limited to disenfranchising them. We are also generally OK with them being killed. When the covid-19 outbreak happened, citizens and government officials rallied to prevent the release of anyone from prison or jail despite the fact that social distancing is impossible behind bars.
In Texas, the number of prisoner covid-19 deaths is skyrocketing, especially at the Wynne Unit in Huntsville where I taught classes for eight years. The general response from the public was to apathetically shrug and say something to the effect of "you do the crime, you do the time." Despite Texas' love for capital punishment, the men at the Wynne Unit were not on death row. They were sentenced to serve a certain number of years, not to be killed.
But no one cares because, after all, they're just criminals.
The bias doesn't end at letting them die of a preventable disease; we are also OK when they are murdered. At the Mother of All Rallies, a 2017 Trump-supporter event in Washington, D.C., the organizers gave the Black Lives Matter protesters the stage for a few minutes to express their position. Hawk Newsome, president of BLM of Greater New York, referenced the murder of Eric Garner who, like Floyd, exclaimed "I can't breathe!" as he was choked to death by a police officer.
When Newsome stated, "So you ask why there's a Black Lives Matter, because you can watch a black man die and be choked to death on television and nothing happens. We need to address that," he was met with a chorus of boos from the Trump-supporting crowd.
One MAGA-hat-wearing woman responded by shouting, "Shut up! He was a criminal! He was a criminal!" In her mind, and the American mind, being a criminal meant it was OK for someone to choke you to death in the street.
The only difference between Owens' statement and that woman's is that Owens now acknowledges that it's not OK to murder someone just for breaking the law. We have to be better than this. We cannot call prison "paying your debt to society" and still hold the debt against them.
As Bryan Stevenson said, "Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done." All of us, criminals included, can be heroes and martyrs.
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Adam Key, Ph.D., MFA, is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. His research involves understanding how society creates categories of deviance which guide thought and behavior.