-As you were there and interacting with Officer
Thao and Officer Chauvin, you grew more and more upset.
Would you agree with that?
-Correct.
-The defense has really focused on this idea of anger.
That is really a trope that comes from,
you know, long-held stereotypes about Black men and Black women.
My understanding of the defense team's strategy
is it seems to, essentially, fall into two pieces.
One, which is upcoming, is to, essentially,
argue that George Floyd's death
was not due to former Officer Derek Chauvin's actions,
but due to his own health conditions
and his drug dependency.
But, right now, a lot of the strategy
is based on the idea of anger and the fact that the crowd
that gathered on the street in Minneapolis was angry
and that anger distracted Chauvin and created a situation
that the officer saw as volatile.
-I believe, according to your professional record,
because you had an amateur career,
then you had a professional career, right?
-Correct.
-And you had 11 professional fights?
-Possibly. I don't even know
how many fights I took.
-Donald Williams was one of the bystanders
on the street that day
and he's also one of the witnesses
who has testified over the course of two days.
And what makes him somewhat unique
is that he has this background in mixed martial arts
and so really seems to have a keen understanding
of what the repercussions could be from the officer
having his knee on Mr Floyd's neck.
It was, I thought, pretty clear, during the cross-examination,
that the defense really wanted to draw out this idea
that Mr Williams was angry and it was uncontrolled anger
and it was dangerous and that he was,
you know, to use the classic cliché,
that he was an angry Black man.
And Mr Williams refused to allow himself to be painted that way.
-Do you recall saying,
"I dare you to touch me like that.
I swear I'll slap the [bleep] [bleep] both of you"?
-Yeah, I did.
I meant it. -Alright.
So, again, sir, it's fair to say
that you grew angrier and angrier?
-No.
I grew professional and professional.
I stayed in my body.
You can't paint me out to be angry.
-Shocking to kind of see Eric Nelson, Chauvin's attorney,
actually bring this up on the stand and attempt
to actually paint him as being this angry Black man.
And, you know, it was called out online and critics vehemently
also called it out, too.
And, if you actually notice, in the testimony from this week,
right after he had wrapped up,
Mr Williams actually winked at Eric Nelson
because he knew
what he was attempting to actually paint him as.
-You testified that you've walked to Cup Foods hundreds,
if not thousands, of times.
-Correct.
-And that you felt safe doing so.
-Any time of the night, I would walk there.
-Okay.
Would you agree that you had previously
told members of the prosecution team that,
at night, the neighborhood can be a little bit more dangerous?
-Some nights.
I mean, it wasn't really known for violence like every night
or a lot, a lot, but I feel like any area
has some type of crime from here and there.
-Sure. -And so the suggestion
that the neighborhood was unsafe,
that she should've been afraid of her surroundings,
of her community, I think, again,
it was really sort of relying on a lot of stereotypes about race
and about what that means about communities
that are predominantly people of color
and how people should respond within those communities.
Suggesting that, you know, if this community's unsafe,
then that is a reason to walk through those communities
on guard and feeling that, at every turn, there's a threat
and that the people in that community are a threat.
And, you know, to go down that route,
I think, is a very slippery slope.
-Whether it was problematic or not,
I think it really goes back to the defense team strategy
they've had,
in terms of just kind of building this world
and this environment on that day,
in that neighborhood, in George Floyd's life.
So, to insinuate or suggest like Officer Chauvin's team
has done is a part of this larger strategy
they had to sow any kind of doubt
into either George Floyd's life or into the environment
which could have caused this horrible incident to happen.