Black officer (HALF-BLACK-conflicted by white mother),who detained George Floyd had pledged to fix police
By NEW YORK TIMES |
PUBLISHED: June 28, 2020 at 10:26 a.m. | UPDATED: June 28, 2020 at 10:37 a.m.
MINNEAPOLIS — There were two Black men at the scene of the police killing in Minneapolis last month that roiled the nation. One, George Floyd, was sprawled on the asphalt, with a white officer’s knee on his neck. The other Black man, Alex Kueng, was a rookie police officer who held his back as Floyd struggled to breathe.Floyd, whose name has been painted on murals and scrawled on protest signs, has been laid to rest. Kueng, who faces charges of aiding and abetting in Floyd’s death, is out on bail, hounded at the supermarket by strangers and denounced by some family members.
Long before Kueng was arrested, he had wrestled with the issue of police abuse of Black people, joining the force in part to help protect people close to him from police aggression. He argued that diversity could force change in a Police Department long accused of racism.
J. Alexander Kueng (Courtesy of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office)
He had seen one sibling arrested and treated poorly, in his view, by sheriff’s deputies. He had found himself defending his decision to join the police force, saying he thought it was the best way to fix a broken system. He had clashed with friends over whether public demonstrations could actually make things better.“He said, ‘Don’t you think that that needs to be done from the inside?’” his mother, Joni Kueng, recalled him saying after he watched protesters block a highway years ago. “That’s part of the reason why he wanted to become a police officer — and a Black police officer on top of it — is to bridge that gap in the community, change the narrative between the officers and the Black community.”
As hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated against the police after Floyd’s killing on May 25, Kueng became part of a national debate over police violence toward Black people, a symbol of the very sort of policing he had long said he wanted to stop.
Derek Chauvin, the officer who placed his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes, has been most widely associated with the case. He faces charges of second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter; Kueng and two other former officers were charged with aiding and abetting the killing. At 26, Kueng was the youngest and least experienced officer at the scene, on only his third shift as a full officer.
The arrest of Kueng, whose mother is white and whose father was from Nigeria, has brought anguish to his friends and family. “It’s a gut punch,” Joni Kueng said. “Here you are, you’ve raised this child, you know who he is inside and out. We’re such a racially diverse family. To be wrapped up in a racially motivated incident like this is just unfathomable.”
Two of Alex Kueng’s siblings, Taylor and Radiance, both of whom are African American, called for the arrests of all four officers, including their brother. They joined protests in Minneapolis. In a Facebook Live video, Taylor Kueng, 21, appeared with the head of the local NAACP to speak of the injustice that befell Floyd, acknowledging being related to Alex Kueng but never mentioning his name.
Alex Kueng’s sister Radiance posted a video of Floyd’s final minutes on Facebook. “Just broke my heart,” she wrote. In an interview, she said that as a Black man, her brother should have intervened. She said she planned to change her last name in part because she did not want to be associated with her brother’s actions.
“I don’t care if it was his third day at work or not,” she said. “He knows right from wrong.”
A FULL HOUSE
Through his life, Alex Kueng straddled two worlds, Black and white.
Kueng, whose full name is J. Alexander Kueng (pronounced “king”), was raised by his mother, whom he lived with until last year. His father was absent.
As a child, Kueng sometimes asked for siblings. Joni Kueng, who lived in the Shingle Creek neighborhood in north Minneapolis, signed up with an African American adoption agency.
When Alex was 5, Joni Kueng brought home a baby boy who had been abandoned at a hospital. Alex soon asked for a sister; Radiance arrived when he was 11. Taylor and a younger brother came in 2009, when Alex was about 16.
Radiance Kueng, 21, said their adoptive mother did not talk about race. “Race was not really a topic in our household, unfortunately,” she said. “For her adopting as many Black kids as she did — I didn’t get that conversation from her. I feel like that should have been a conversation that was had.” Growing up, Alex Kueng and his family made repeated trips to Haiti, helping at an orphanage. Alex Kueng and his siblings took a break from school to volunteer there after the earthquake in 2010.
Joni Kueng, 56, likes to say that the Kuengs are a family of doers, not talkers.
“I had to stay out of the race conversations because I was the minority in the household,” Joni Kueng said in her first interview since her son’s arrest. She said that race was not an issue with her, but that she was conflicted. “It didn’t really matter, but it does matter to them because they are African American. And so they had to be able to have an outlet to tell their stories and their experience as well, especially having a white mom.”
Joni Kueng taught math at the schools her children went to, where the student body was often mostly Hmong, African American and Latino. Classmates described Alex Kueng as friends with everyone, a master of juggling a soccer ball and a defender against bullies. Photos portray him with a sly smile.
Darrow Jones said he first met Alex Kueng on the playground when he was 6. Jones was trying to finish his multiplication homework. Alex Kueng helped Jones and then invited him into a game of tag.
When Jones’ mother died in 2008, Joni Kueng took him in for as long as a month at a time.
By high school, Alex Kueng had found soccer, and soon that was all he wanted to do. He became captain of the soccer team; he wanted to turn pro. The quote next to his senior yearbook picture proclaimed, “We ignore failures and strive for success.”
Alex Kueng went to Monroe College in New Rochelle, New York, to play soccer and study business. But after surgery on both knees, soccer proved impossible. Alex Kueng quit. Back in Minneapolis, he enrolled in technical college and supported himself catching shoplifters at Macy’s.
About that time, he started talking about joining the police, Joni Kueng recalled. She said she was nervous, for his safety and also because of the troubled relationship between the Minneapolis police and residents.
Given his background, Alex Kueng thought he had the ability to bridge the gap between white and Black worlds, Jones said. He often did not see the same level of racism that friends felt. Jones, who is Black, recalled a road trip a few years ago to Utah with Alex Kueng, a white friend and Alex Kueng’s girlfriend, who is Hmong. Jones said he had to explain to Alex Kueng why people were staring at the group.
“Once we got to Utah, we walked into a store, and literally everybody’s eyes were on us,” recalled Jones, whose skin is darker than Alex Kueng’s. “I said, ‘Alex, that’s because you’re walking in here with a Black person. The reason they’re staring at us is because you’re here with me.’”
By February 2019, Alex Kueng had made up his mind: He signed up as a police cadet. Only a few months later, his sibling Taylor, a longtime supporter of Black Lives Matter who had volunteered as a counselor at a Black heritage camp and as a mentor to at-risk Black youths, had a confrontation with law enforcement.
Taylor Kueng and a friend saw local sheriff’s deputies questioning two men in a downtown Minneapolis shopping district about drinking in public. They intervened. Taylor Kueng used a cellphone to record video of the deputies putting the friend, in a striped summer dress, on the ground. “You’re hurting me!” the friend shouted.
As the confrontation continued, a deputy turned to Taylor Kueng and said, “Put your hands behind your back.” “For what?” Taylor Kueng asked several times. “Because,” said the deputy, threatening to use his Taser.
Taylor Kueng called home. Alex Kueng and their mother rushed to get bail and then to the jail. “Don’t worry, I got you,” Alex Kueng told his sibling, hugging Taylor, their mother recalled.
Alex Kueng reminded his sibling that those were sheriff’s deputies, not the city force he was joining, and criticized their behavior, his mother recalled.
After Taylor Kueng’s video went public, the city dropped the misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and obstructing the legal process. The sheriff’s office announced an official review of the arrests, which resulted in no discipline.
DIVERGING PATHS
Alex Kueng’s choice to become a police officer caused a rift in his friendship with Jones.
“It was very clear where we stood on that,” said Jones, a Black Lives Matter supporter who protested on the streets after the deaths of Jamar Clark and Philando Castile at the hands of police. “Our fundamental disagreement around law enforcement is not that I believe cops are bad people. I just believe that the system needs to be completely wiped out and replaced. It’s the difference between reform and rebuilding.”
After Alex Kueng became a cadet, Jones went from seeing Alex Kueng twice a month to maybe three times a year. He said he did not even tell Alex Kueng when the police pursued him for nothing and then let him go.
In December, Alex Kueng graduated from the police academy. For most of his field training, Chauvin, with 19 years on the job, was his training officer.
At one point, Alex Kueng, upset, called his mother. He said he had done something during training that bothered a supervising officer, who reamed him out. Joni Kueng did not know if that supervisor was Chauvin.
Chauvin also extended Alex Kueng’s training period. He felt Alex Kueng was meeting too often with a fellow police trainee, Thomas Lane, when responding to calls, rather than handling the calls on his own, Joni Kueng said.
But on May 22, Alex Kueng officially became one of about 80 Black officers on a police force of almost 900. In recent years, the department, not as racially diverse as the city’s population, has tried to increase the number of officers of color, with limited success.
That evening, other officers held a small party at the Third Precinct station to celebrate Alex Kueng’s promotion. The next evening, he worked his first full shift as an officer, inside the station. On that Sunday, he worked the 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. patrol shift, his first on the streets.
On May 25, Alex Kueng’s third day on the job, Alex Kueng and Lane, now partnered up despite both being freshly minted rookies, were the first officers to answer a call of a counterfeit $20 bill being passed at a corner store. They found Floyd in a car outside.
After they failed to get Floyd into the back of a squad car, Chauvin and Tou Thao, another officer, showed up.
As Chauvin jammed his knee into the back of Floyd’s neck, Alex Kueng held down Floyd’s back, according to a probable cause statement filed by prosecutors.
Chauvin kept his knee there as Floyd repeated “I can’t breathe” and “mama” and “please.” Through the passing minutes, Alex Kueng did nothing to intervene, prosecutors say. After Floyd stopped moving, Alex Kueng checked Floyd’s pulse. “I couldn’t find one,” Alex Kueng told the other officers. Critics of the police said the fact that none of the junior officers stopped Chauvin showed that the system itself needed to be overhauled.
“How do you as an individual think that you’re going to be able to change that system, especially when you’re going in at a low level?” said Michelle Gross, president of Communities United Against Police Brutality in Minneapolis. “You’re not going to feel OK to say, ‘Stop, senior officer.’ The culture is such, that that kind of intervening would be greatly discouraged.”
All four officers have been fired. All four face 40 years in prison. Alex Kueng, who was released on bail on June 19, declined through his lawyer to be interviewed. He is set to appear in court Monday.
A day after Floyd’s death, Jones learned that Alex Kueng was one of the officers who had been present. Around midnight, Jones called Alex Kueng. They talked for 40 minutes — about what, Jones would not say — and they cried.
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“I’m feeling a lot of sadness and a lot of disappointment,” Jones said. “A lot of us believe he should have stepped in and should have done something.”He added: “It’s really hard. Because I do have those feelings and I won’t say I don’t. But though I feel sad about what’s occurred, he still has my unwavering support. Because we grew up together, and I love him.”
Jones said he had gone to the protests but could not bring himself to join in.
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Get Light or Die Trying
In November 1997, a 58-year old retired female clerical worker presented to the Dermatology Outpatient Clinic of Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, Ghana “with complaints of dark patches on light-exposed areas of the face, arms, neck, hands, legs and feet of about 10 years duration” as well as a large fungating ulcer on the right side of her neck. Despite a continuous regime of treatment spanning the course of 14 months, her condition failed to improve. In February 1999, the patient died. The cause of death — sun-related squamous cell carcinoma with pulmonary metastasis precipitated by the habitual application of hydroquinone and later steroid-containing creams. Translated – this Ghanaian woman’s death was caused by a type of skin cancer, which later spread to her lungs, and was attributed to her ritual practice of skin bleaching for more than 20 years of her adult life.
In May 2001, Ghanaian boxing fans watched as veteran boxer Percy Oblitei Commey’s skin literally fell apart. The Ghana Review International reported that early in the fourth round, his opponent, Smith Odoom, delivered a series of punches to Commey’s face, opening a deep cut on his right cheek. As the fight progressed, Commey suffered similar cuts in both nostrils and his right ear, causing him to bleed profusely. By the seventh round, Commey’s cornermen and ringside doctors attempted to give the boxer medical attention but found that they could not suture the wounds – his skin was disastrously thin. Not only did Commey lose his national super-featherweight belt, but his “dark” secret had been exposed: Commey had habitually bleached his skin. Twice a day, he followed a regimen that included steroid soap, a lightening shampoo, and two hydroquinone creams. The once popular 6’4” boxer was booed by fans and subsequently became the object of media ridicule, reportedly because of his “feminine look.” Commey would enter the ring only once more, three years later.
While the death of the retired female clerical worker and the imagery conjured by the mention of Commey’s injuries are indeed disturbing to say the least, theirs are not isolated incidents. According to a 2005 Ghana Health Service report, approximately 30% of Ghanaian women and 5% of Ghanaian men are “currently actively bleaching.”
The incidence of skin bleaching – the intentional alteration of one’s natural skin color to one relatively, if not substantially, lighter in color, through the use of chemical skin lightening agents, either manufactured, homemade, or any combination of the two – has been well documented in Africa. In some parts of the continent, bleaching is nothing less than a way of life. An estimated:
- Seventy five percent of traders in Lagos, Nigeria (2002)
- 52% of the population in Dakar, Senegal, 35% in Pretoria, South Africa (2004)
- 50% of the female population in Bamako, Mali (2000)
- 8 out of 10 seemingly light-skinned women in Cote d’Ivoire (1998)
- 60% of Zambian women ages 30 – 39 (2005)
- 50 -60% of adult Ghanaian women
currently or have at one time or other actively used skin bleaching agents. Nigeria now holds the title of “Number 1 for Skin Bleaching Products” by the World Health Organization.
Though my research focuses on skin bleaching in Africa, the practice is not specific to Africa or people of African descent for that matter. In fact, wherever we find people of color, so too do we find the practice of skin bleaching. And throughout the world, the practice disproportionately affects female populations.
In parts of South Asia, where many parents advise their children to avoid sunlight because flawlessly milky white skin is coveted, cosmetic whiteners are indispensable in everyday skincare. According to a 2003 report, 38% of women in Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan and the Philippines use whitening products, and 43% of the women surveyed “believed a fair complexion would make them more attractive to men.” Asian women reportedly spend exorbitant amounts of money to buy high-end bleaching products such as those manufactured by L’oreal, the largest cosmetics company in the world, and the leading European manufacturer of skin whitening products.
Similarly, in India, where “60 percent of all beauty products sold are skin lightening agents,” skin tone impacts both marriage marketability and the ability to gain white-collar employment. All-purpose skin bleaching products are marketed frequently and aggressively…
…but so are products geared for specific areas, like the underarms…
…and more ‘intimate’ areas…
What’s interesting about India is that it is one of the few places where men’s bleaching does not hold the same stigma as it does elsewhere in the world. In many other places, men who bleach are regarded effeminate for taking part in something that is regarded a woman’s practice. But in India, skin bleaching is practiced openly by both men and women. To preserve their masculinity, however, Indian men are expected to use their own products, and not those made for women; at least that’s way that Fair and Handsome, is India’s #1 whitening cream designed specifically for men, spins it. In addition to print advertisements, it broadcasts a number of television commercials not only in India, but in the UK as well.
Interestingly enough, in 2010, when Vaseline launched a skin whitening app for Facebook, specifically for India, it was the image of a man that was used. Using this application, Facebookers can manipulate their photos so that they can appear whiter than they actually are. According to Vaseline, the response has been “pretty phenomenal.”
Despite the global presence of regulatory boards comparable to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the skin lightening products marketed, sold, and used across the world are more chemically potent than those marketed, sold, and used here in the United States. In the U.S., hydroquinone, one of the active agents found in skin-bleaching creams, cannot be obtained in percentages above 2% without a prescription; and by prescription, the highest percentage legally available is 4%. The manufactured skin bleaches found in many parts of Africa contain potentially lethal doses of substances like hydroquinone (between 4% and 25%), corticosteroids, mercury iodide, and various additional caustic agents. When exposed to sunlight, a staple in most parts of Africa, these chemicals prove even more hazardous.
Contact with these agents can cause a wide array of opportunistic infections and skin disorders, including allergies, ulcers and ultimately skin cancer or leukemia in some cases…..people who bleach become so thin-skinned they’re unable to receive injections and other routine medical procedures including stitching following surgery or accidents. In extreme cases, mercury and metals are absorbed at such a level that brain and kidney damage occurs, sometimes resulting in death. Withdrawal from the corticosteroids can lead to shock, which can be fatal (emphasis mine, McKinley, 2001, 96).
In the absence of manufactured products, many people use homemade admixtures. Some mix both manufactured and homemade products for a more potent brew. And yet despite the ravaging effects of both homemade and manufactured products, many people continue to bleach, some to the point of death. Governmental and medical authorities’ attempts to abolish skin bleaching by controlling the dosage and availability of manufactured bleaching agents fail to address people’s continued need to use the products. Even if legislative bans on bleaching agents were to be fully enforced, such efforts would only serve to minimize the incidence or more likely force it underground, not eradicate it. For in the minds of many, the privileges assigned to light skin, whether actual or assumed, are worth dying for.
Sources:
Addo, H.A. (2000). Squamous Cell Carcinoma Associated with Prolonged Bleaching. Ghana Medical Journal, 34, 144-146.
Chisholm, N.J. (2002, January 22). Fade to White: Skin Bleaching and the Rejection of Blackness.
McKinley, C. (2001, May).Yellow Fever. Honey Magazine, 96-99.
See also:
Skin Bleaching and Global White Supremacy: By Way of Introduction
Butt power versus Black power …
View previous comments…
1
BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL! 
Very enlightening. It’s rather unfortunate how the opinion of others etc push people to such ends.
Indeed! White supremacy is the biggest ‘opinion-pusher’ of them all. Thank you for reading, Tina!
Thanks Dr. Yaba
Thank you for reading, Fatou!
informative! You should see what’s happening in The Gambia…maybe you should look into that too Dr. Yaba. I saw the statistics about Senegal, I wonder what are the numbers for Gambia?
It’s everywhere! I haven’t seen the numbers in Gambia and I’m not sure who is doing that research. Will keep my eyes open. Thank you for reading, Aisha!
Thanks for the info and data on skin bleaching in Africa. I have been following your work and needed data and literature on skin bleaching in Africa for my Lit Review. Completing my Masters thesis on skin bleaching in Jamaica. Its a qualitative study entitled “The Browning Phenomenon”
Thanks for reading, Richard! Please let me know if I can share any resources with you. You must of course be familiar with Christopher Charles’ work. I look forward to reading your thesis soon!
I found these articles very interesting. I was born very light skin & was teased throughout school. Only other races would play with me. So I tried to suntan myself black. Confusion set in. I messed skin up trying to be “black” and last year I was using bleach crime to over correct the damage I did. I would try to change my color by friends, jobs, advantages. Now all I want to be is me no matter what color. I would very much like to read more on the subject. I feel society makes us choose what color we should be at times. I hate that. But most of my life I have battled this. Thank you for writing on this project. It really made me mad at myself.
Everyone has their own reasons for having white skin, smooth, clean. Certainly have been described in the article above, that it skin disease is not come by itself but because of the wrong skin care.
There is also damage to the skin caused by cosmetic skin itself. Therefore, if you want to pick look at the measure of beauty products use ingredients that beauty, so that we remain untreated skin.
Harrowing and heartwrenching: I am a dark chocolate brown (similiar to the First Lady Michelle Obama’s shade) and cannot imagine being fueled by such societal pressures and such self-loathing that I would sabotage my own skin tone. I take pride in it and also convey that message to my children, I hope future generations learn from those who suffered and died needlessly and love what they are naturally endowed with: melanin-rich and beautifully brown skin.
Colonization has been a devastating cancer all over the world, it’s time to unlearn what we have learned and put truth in it’s place.