1
MANDINGO
(Racism)
On May 25, 2020, a white Minneapolis police officer named Derek Chauvin violently pressed his knee into the neck of a Black man named George Floyd, crushing him into the ground for some eight minutes and forty-six seconds.
This ended Floyd’s life at just forty-six years of age, about thirty years younger than the average age a white man like Chauvin might expect to live in the United States. Floyd’s fatal encounter with the police began after he was accused of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill at a convenience store. The store clerk had effectively been deputized as an enforcer of currency law; and even though he offered to pay for the counterfeit bill, he was compelled by his manager to call the police anyway, which would lead to Floyd’s being executed by the state of Minnesota without so much as a trial.
But long before a jury would take the unusual step of convicting Chauvin of murder—which happens in only about one out of every two thousand police killings—an autopsy revealed another way Floyd might have prematurely died.
Though it got only passing mention in the news at the time, George Floyd died with SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in his system. This meant he had recently contracted the virus that was a leading cause of death in the United States that summer, especially among Black men. When we find viruses, we are going to find them residing among people who are plagued by many painful, lethal manifestations of racism.
Before his gruesome, horrifying death, Floyd had endured a difficult life marked by racism at various turns. He had served several jail terms, including one where the sole accusations against him came from a police officer who was later charged with falsifying evidence and murder. Floyd had done itinerant work as a truck driver and guard, once working security at a homeless shelter. And in 2020, he had already lost one part-time driving job for being in a minor crash. Then he had lost his other part-time security job at a club closed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The cops came for him that fateful day in May because he was poor and using counterfeit money (either out of desperation or, maybe, unwittingly because someone else had passed the phony bill on to him). But if he’d survived his arrest, he might have gone to jail, where he still might have died, though perhaps more slowly, or out of the view of a camera—like Sandra Bland, the Black woman who died in a holding cell after being arrested in Texas in 2015.
Or Floyd might have gotten out of jail only to die of COVID-19, as so many Black people did that month.
Or—given that his girlfriend would later testify how they both suffered from addiction—he might have survived his arrest and COVID-19 only to later die of a drug overdose.
We will never know what might have happened with George Floyd, because Derek Chauvin calmly murdered him. What I do know for sure, though, is that throughout his life, Floyd was repeatedly plagued by the vector of racism—and in one way or another, racism was going to get him.
When he died, the City of Minneapolis had been spending more than a third of its annual budget on policing—far more than it spent on public housing or health care. This is what structural racism looks like; it allows viruses to seep into a city’s cracks and efficiently transmit and reproduce among Black people. When people don’t have access to health care, they are more likely to be susceptible to all diseases, including infectious ones (and more likely to transmit those diseases to their kinfolk, especially if they live in crowded households). If people don’t have stable housing, they are much less likely to get access to health care of any kind.
The budget priorities of Minneapolis increased the odds that its police would have a deadly encounter with someone like Floyd and increased the odds that Floyd would encounter the novel coronavirus. At the same time, the Minneapolis budget decreased the odds that a Black man like Floyd would encounter the social support he needed to avoid poverty, addiction, or pathogens in the first place. It was no coincidence that in the summer of Floyd’s murder, the United States represented less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but was home to about 25 percent of global COVID-19 deaths and 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated people. And it was no coincidence that the people in America getting arrested, going to prison, and dying of COVID-19 were disproportionately Black.
Apart from the external forces that shorten the lives of Black people (prisons, policing, poverty), the stress of racism has its own insidious effect on Black men’s bodies in particular. The epidemiologist Sherman James has identified a medical condition he calls John Henryism (after the American steel-driving folk hero) to describe the quantifiable biological effects of the stress of racism, in the form of conditions like hypertension and kidney disease. These form a basis for why Black men die years younger than other demographic groups.
Similarly, it was viruses that taught me to see how racism manifests physiologically in Black bodies, consigning people to health disparities and premature death. Viruses also revealed to me how and where Black people are ensnared by poverty and the criminal justice system.
But while George Floyd’s murder demonstrated the link between racism and viruses with stark clarity, I first learned about this dynamic years before, when a trusted editor sent me to a city I’d never visited to report on a disturbing story involving HIV and a young Black man known as “Tiger Mandingo.”
* * *
In May 2014, I found myself staying in a miserable efficiency motel in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. It was the kind of place where desperate people rented rooms by the week. Illuminated by stark, depressing fluorescent lights and staffed by people who seemed embarrassed to be seen there by the guests, these joyless dwellings were where people (like me) engaged in shady work and were economically stretched to their breaking point.
I was in St. Louis to investigate the story of Michael “Tiger Mandingo” Johnson, a twenty-three-year-old student wrestler. I had been paid a flat fee for my assignment, and I had already put in many weeks of work and spent most of my budget on plane fare and expenses. I still didn’t know if I’d even get to interview the main person I’d come to meet. This dingy motel was all I could afford.
The story I was there to report was a salacious one. Michael Johnson had been arrested the previous October in a classroom at Lindenwood University. He was one of the few Black students at the private school located in the “white flight” suburb of St. Charles. With its 91 percent white population, St. Charles has radically different racial demographics from nearby St. Louis, which many white suburbanites had fled.
Yet, despite being in the minority, Johnson had been a well-liked and popular student athlete on campus. Prior to enrolling at Lindenwood, he’d been a national star on the junior college wrestling circuit. And though wrestling was his main sport, social media posts showed him hanging out with cheerleaders and working out with athletes in all sports at Lindenwood. Johnson, with his infectious smile, was photographed with men and women, students and coaches who were Black and white, gay and straight.
But in the fall of 2013, he was accused of having sex with five men without telling them he’d been diagnosed with HIV before they hooked up. For this, he’d been charged with “recklessly” transmitting, or exposing someone to, HIV, and under Missouri law, he now faced the possibility of life in prison.
A couple months before I first landed in Missouri, Pulitzer Prize–winning editor Mark Schoofs (who had been covering HIV/AIDS for decades and who’d just started an investigative unit at BuzzFeed News) invited me out to dinner to pitch Johnson’s story to me. Mark was concerned that, except for stories about the initial arrest, a case of HIV transmission being treated as akin to murder wasn’t getting much media coverage. He knew about my interest in the criminalization of interracial desire, as I’d written about my deceased parents, an interracial couple who were legally barred from marriage in Nebraska, where they’d met, in 1958. Mark also correctly predicted that at least some of this “Mandingo’s” sex partners were white, and he told me that when news of Johnson’s arrest went viral, it consisted of news stories that had merely repeated the prosecutor’s press releases.
No one had actually interviewed Johnson or his partners. Mark wanted to send me to St. Louis to find them and to interview Johnson himself in the St. Charles County Department of Corrections facility where he awaited trial—and that’s how I wound up in that awful motel a few months later.
One of the first conversations I had while reporting Johnson’s story had been with a white male college student who, in January 2013, noticed a profile on a gay mobile hookup app for a Black guy with ripped abs and a chiseled chest. The guy’s username was “Tiger Mandingo.”
“I am more into white guys, but I like Black guys, and there were certain things about him,” the student told me over the phone. “His body was gorgeous, and he had great legs, and he was well endowed.”
When they met, the student at Lindenwood University quickly recognized that, in real life, Tiger Mandingo also attended his school and was a recent transfer student on the wrestling team. They hooked up later that month in Johnson’s dorm room, where, the student said, Johnson told him he was “clean.”
Johnson invited the white student to go out again sometime, but the student got busy and “didn’t have time for that.” They didn’t hook up again until early October, this time without using a condom. But the white student wasn’t worried, he said, because Johnson had told him yet again that he was “clean.”
To declare oneself “clean,” in these scenarios of gay parlance, is akin to saying, “I don’t have any viruses, bacteria, or sexually transmitted infections.” It’s an absurd claim—who can really know at any time which microorganisms are inside them? But it’s a claim that gay men ask one another to make all the time.
The white student told me he had “barebacked” (had unprotected intercourse) with multiple “friends and ex-boyfriends,” situations in which “we trusted each other. I mean, I don’t just let anybody do it.” He said that knowing people well made them trustworthy.
Copyright © 2022 by Steven W. Thrasher
