George Floyd NFTs are just the tip of a racist crypto iceberg.

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/floydies-racist-nfts


George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on his throat for nine minutes and 29 seconds. The 46-year-old left behind five children, four siblings and a heartbroken community who lifted his image up as a symbol of American racial injustice. Floyd was resurrected after death, as the heart of a furious protest movement and a reminder of how little had changed after decades of police promises to do better.

A year and a half after he died, Floyd was resurrected again, but under far more problematic auspices. On December 9, 2021, a little NFT (non-fungible token) project dubbed “Floydies” launched, offering people a chance to spend cryptocurrency on images of a crudely pixelated George Floyd. The NFTs illustrate Floyd with bloodshot eyes and a litany of offensive and racist themes, depicting Floyd as a “buck broken” enslaved man with a chain collar, as Kyle Rittenhouse and as a literal ape, among many, many other examples.

Unbelievably, the Floydies NFT is marketed by its creators as a “a unique and progressive way to celebrate the monumental life of George Floyd,” even telling BuzzFeed News that the project is a “great service to the BIPOC community.”

It’s a trolling way to wave away the obviously racist elements embedded throughout the project, even beyond the portrayals of Floyd himself. While it’s unclear who the creators are, they have openly tweeted, for example, that buying a Floydie comes with “an ‘N-word’ pass,” writing in a statement that “Black people… are often not equipped to make such important decisions” on the matter. They’ve also been crowing about getting a “like” on Twitter from the account of the San Francisco Police Department’s Central Bureau, claiming that it could be the “first step of healing” between the Black community and police. (SFPD, meanwhile, has launched an internal investigation into who screwed up.)

*snip*

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. But the headline repeats itself

[Nevilledog]

2. Wut?!

[brush]

3. Hah! Anybody who buys NTFs are not equiped to make important decisions. In other words...

fools and their money are soon parted.