Reports of the President of the United States of America hiding in a bunker in the architectural wonder called the White House confirms the hideous depths to which the country has sunk over the colour of the skin and the consequent man’s inhumanity to man.

It is hard not to wonder whether the death of George Floyd, a black, after a white policeman knelt on his neck ~ “I can’t breathe,” he had cried ~ is a turning point in the racist narrative of a libertarian democracy. Indeed, the nationwide protests following the brutal suffocation of an unarmed black man in Minneapolis could be a defining moment in America’s racial politics in an election year.

The sheer scale of the protests over Floyd’s killing ~ breaking curfews and defying National Guard troops, over six days and across nearly 40 American cities ~ suggests that this death may prove a turning point, for all the racist bluster of Mr Trump in the immediate aftermath of the killing. Attempts to dismiss those participating in the protests as merely lawless rioters, or outof- state “anarchists”, in the words of President Trump, are a contrived attempt to debunk a mass expression of revulsion and fury.

The horrific memories of Ferguson and San Bernadino still rankle. Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Walter Scott and now Floyd: the litany of names of black men who died as a result of encountering the wrong law officer at the wrong time continues to lengthen.

Video footage, in the cases of Garner and Scott, revealed to the world the brutality with which they were done to death. The shooting of 17-year-old Martin by a Florida community watch officer, and the decision of a jury to acquit his killer, led to the creation of the movement styled as Black Lives Matter.

The enormity of last week’s tragedy is heightened by the fact that in the America of 2020, it is possible for a white police officer to kneel for nearly nine minutes on an unarmed Floyd’s windpipe in broad daylight, and thus crush the breath and life out of him.

It is the misfortune of the United States to be helmed by a President who stokes racial division as a matter of political strategy. His remark last week that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” was a faint echo of the words of a notorious Miami police chief during racial unrest in 1967.

Considerable has been the economic impact of Trumpian racism, also manifest during the Barack Obama dispensation. The pandemic, decidedly mishandled by Mr Trump, has killed African Americans at almost three times the rate of white Americans.

The economic devastation wrought by the disease has pushed the unemployment rate close to 20 per cent, on a par with the Great Depression. The fallout has disproportionately affected African Americans.