The first thing they told Gianna Floyd was that
Dad had died because he couldn't breathe
. And it was true. "I can't breathe," were a few words that George Floyd repeated, over and over again, with his hoarse voice and the muffled gasp that precedes death from suffocation, that May 25 at the corner of East 38th and Chicago streets, in Minneapolis. "I can't breathe" later became
one of the slogans of the summer of fire, looting and blood
that ravaged the United States and in which dozens of people were killed in the worst wave of racial violence in that country in 52 years.
But Gianna wasn't told the whole truth. They hid from him that his father could not breathe because
the left knee of police officer Derek Chauvin was on his neck
for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, according to the cameras that the officers wear in their uniform. The last thing Floyd did, according to eyewitnesses,
was call his mother
, who had died two years earlier.
Eleven months have passed. Gianna, who everyone calls 'Ginni', turned seven in December.
He had a spectacular birthday.
It was a surprise that was paid by rapper Lil Baby, who this year saw two Grammys - Oscars of music - escape him for his song
The Big Picture
, it was published after the murder of Floyd and which is a hymn to the controversial Lives Matter movement Negras (
Black Lives Matter
). It was held at the Pink Hotel, a place specializing in children's parties, very popular with the city's black community. And it had some characteristic elements of that group. For example,
that Ginni was given a manicure and pedicure.
If you want to know how black American women care for their nails, look at the hands
of Ginni's mother, Roxie Washington.
It had to be a big party.
According to the financial magazine
Forbes
, he
started planning six months in advance.
It was also a safe party.
There were few attendees, and safety distances were kept, something extremely important
in December, a month in which more than 3,000
people died a day from Covid-19
in the United States
.
Among the children who were invited were
the four children of Rayshard Brooks, an African American who was shot and killed by police
three weeks after Floyd in Atlanta, in what Justice is investigating as an alleged murder. There were also Lil Baby's two children, and
all six - each from a different mother - of rapper Future
. Of the
celebrities
who attended, there is only one who had a relationship with Gianna and her father: Stephen Jackson, a former NBA basketball player who was one of Floyd's closest friends. It is precisely Jackson who, in a video on Instagram nine days after the murder of the street corner that went
viral recorded shortly after the murder
from the corner of East 38th and Chicago streets, he holds Gianna on his shoulders as she yells with the smile that only a six-year-old can have "Daddy changed the world!"
"
Your dad changed the world," US President Joe Biden confirmed to Gianna
when he called her Tuesday last week after a twelve-person jury found Chauvin guilty of all three charges against him. - two of them, murder - in the Floyd death trial.
Biden
has been in contact with Floyd's family since he died
.
Their predecessor, Donald Trump, never called them.
Family-friendly President Biden greets Gianna Floyd
Floyd changed the world.
But her daughter has no father.
Six days after Gianna's Instagram video on Jackson's shoulders, Floyd was buried in Houston. There were Biden, Jackson, and other personalities. Only his little daughter was missing. As his mother, Roxie Washington, explained, "Gianna told me if I was going to be there alive, and I said 'your father is in heaven,' and then she said,
'If he's not alive, I'm not going
.
"
Possibly, that phrase, less spectacular, less hopeful, better reflects the girl's state of mind. Just as Floyd called his mother without answer,
his daughter has called him and has only found silence.
Gianna is like her father: a symbol. It is a symbol of hope and, also,
of the sad reality of low-income black families in the United States,
unstructured, with men who dedicate themselves to
making
children and disappearing, always
between the ghetto, drugs, jail
, or women. Sects, such as Jackson himself, who in January joined the Nation of Islam, a black racist group that claims that whites - and especially Jews - are literally
"beings who have not yet evolved
.
"
But, below the symbol, there is only a seven-year-old orphan, the daughter of a single mother.
Floyd's personal life was stormy.
He had five children with three women.
The largest of these, Quincy, is 22, and he and his father stopped talking when I was 16. When I saw the video of the murder, did not know who he
was until he called her mother on the
phone and said ,
"Do not you You admit, “He's your father
.
”
Floyd's relationship with Giannie seems to have been good, despite the fact that the girl and her mother live in Houston and he resided in Minneapolis, two cities separated by the same distance between Madrid and Berlin.
Washington has served as
Floyd's
official
widow
, despite the fact that in his last three years of life he had
a stable relationship with another woman
, Courteney Ross, who is white and has remained out of the spotlight throughout the tragedy.
In reality, very little is known about the relationship between Gianna and Floyd.
But that is the past, and it is immovable.
The girl's future is where the uncertainty lies.
Her mother insists that she is taking care of her, and Jackson announced last June that he would consider her as his own daughter.
In December, at the birthday party, he repeated it again:
"I believe that God has given me another daughter, and I am going to do the best I can with her
.
"
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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