A biography of George Floyd will be published on May 17, 2022, and appears to whitewash his life story to highlight his constant “search of a better life” and his “relentless struggle to survive as a Black man in America.”
In a press release, Viking Press, a publishing company owned by Penguin Random House, announced the biography, which has been written by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, two prizewinning Washington Post reporters. The book is designed to “reveal how systemic racism shaped George Floyd’s life and legacy—from his family’s roots in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, to ongoing inequality in housing, education, health care, criminal justice, and policing—telling the singular story of how one man’s tragic experience brought about a global movement of change.”
Floyd was killed while in police custody, and former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of his murder. Chauvin is appealing the verdict. Floyd has since become lionized by activists across the country.
It is this lionization that appears to permeate the biography, with Floyd’s many arrests being blamed on anything but himself. From the press release:
This biography of George Floyd shows the athletic young boy raised in the projects of Houston’s Third Ward who would become a father, a partner, a friend, and a man constantly in search of a better life. In retracing Floyd’s story, Samuels and Olorunnipa bring to light the determination Floyd carried as he faced the relentless struggle to survive as a Black man in America.
Developed out of The Washington Post’s award-winning six-part series “George Floyd’s America,” His Name Is George Floyd examines the Floyd family’s roots in slavery and sharecropping, the segregation of his Houston schools, the overpolicing of his communities, the devastating snares of the prison system, and his attempts to break free from drug dependence—putting today’s inequality into uniquely human terms. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews and extensive original reporting, Samuels and Olorunnipa offer a poignant exploration of George Floyd’s life and lasting impact, revealing how a man who simply wanted to breathe ended up touching the world.
The Daily Wire’s Candace Owens has repeatedly highlighted Floyd’s arrest record – not to justify Chauvin’s actions – but to suggest that Floyd should not be held up as a martyr. Earlier this year, after Chauvin was found guilty of murdering Floyd, Owens published an article listing Floyd’s most egregious crimes:
George Floyd had a lengthy and serious criminal record that included nine arrests over the span of a decade which resulted in multiple stints in prison. The charges include delivery of a controlled substance (1997), two separate charges of theft (1998), failure to identify (2001), possession of a controlled substance (2002), trespassing (2003), another charge of delivery of a controlled substance (2004), possession with intent to manufacture or distribute (2005), and – most significantly – aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon (2007).
That last arrest was over an armed robbery of a woman’s home in Houston. Floyd was convicted of the crime in 2009 and spent five years in prison. The media has portrayed Floyd as trying to turn his life around after he was released from prison, but Owens noted that he had allegedly attempted to use a counterfeit bill on the day of his death, which prompted his arrest that day. She also noted that two autopsies indicated he had illegal drugs in his system.
“For whatever reason it has become fashionable over the last five or six years for us to turn criminals into heroes overnight, and it is something that I find to be despicable and there’s something that I refuse to stand by any longer and I am not going to play a part in it — no matter how much pressure comes from black liberals and black conservatives as some token of people wanting you to believe that this is the only way you can be black,” Owens said in a YouTube video published in June 2020.