America was jolted out of its pandemic stupor this week by a dramatic cycle of police violence, protests, looting and retaliation—one that quickly jumped from city to city and crashed, literally, against the gates of the White House.
In some ways, this wave seems familiar: It echoes what happened in Ferguson, in Baltimore, in Los Angeles and in every other city that has exploded in anger after a killing by police. The sweep of the current protests—in hundreds of cities across all 50 states, lasting more than a week so far—and the sense that a moment of national change might have arrived have drawn comparisons to other waves of social unrest dating at least to 1968.
Despite the echoes, it’s also hard not to feel like we’re living through something disorienting and new. The protests and response have taken on complicated dimensions: the unprecedented backdrop of a global pandemic that has left people scared, pent-up and unemployed; the reported involvement of far left and far-right groups, or people posing as such to sow confusion; plus, the chaotic, confrontational politics of the Trump era and its blur of real and fake claims. Oh, and it’s a presidential election year.
To offer some context for what we’re living through, and why it feels especially unsettling right now, Politico Magazine asked a range of thinkers to tell us: What’s really different this time around?
Some pointed, naturally, to the pandemic—the anxiety of enforced isolation; the way it has disproportionately affected people of color; the ubiquity of masks that blur identities and make it harder to parse the motives of different demonstrators, or looters. Some respondents detected a more widespread embrace of violence across the political spectrum—including by the president, police and rioters—while others saw cause for hope, pointing out that police forces actually have embraced reforms in recent years, if not enough to prevent deaths like George Floyd’s. Still others disagreed entirely with the notion that this time is different: At the core of the protests, they said, is an enduring struggle with racism that America has never been able to resolve, and that promises to keep coming back in new ways and with new energy.
Here are their full, varied responses.
Tressie McMillan Cottom is associate professor and senior research fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and author, most recently, of Thick: And Other Essays.
Only time will tell whether this moment is really different, or whether black Americans have merely thirsted for so long that we are drinking sand. The United States has the remarkable ability to reconstitute old oppressions from the ashes of social movements.
What we do know is that this movement is widespread: Every state now has had a protest rejecting police brutality and reaffirming the value of black lives. We owe this overwhelming show of people power to the thousands of young people who grew into their radical potential in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, linking the old strategies of organizing to the new demands of our time: sophisticated surveillance, real-time communications, citizen journalism and crowd fundraising.
We also know that there are new, powerful forces at play in the current protests. For months, the American people have watched their federal and state governments fail to educate and equip them during a global pandemic. We have been subjected to regular presidential addresses that dismiss, discredit and disallow the pain of isolation, death, sickness, fear, poverty and pain. Meanwhile, the things we normally turn to when we are suffering are now gone: While unemployment is always higher for racial minority groups, due to the virus, all Americans are living with record high unemployment right now. Many schools are closed without reopening dates. And it is hard to drink, party, travel and shop to distract ourselves.
All of that means Americans have not had much of anything to do of late except watch Officer Derek Chauvin casually force George Floyd’s life force from his body. For the first time in a long time, our polarized and plural populace experienced an extrajudicial murder collectively and almost in real time, just as we were living through the same collective state failures around Covid-19. With their focus shifted to the virus, the police and political apparatus might have been slower to bring the full brunt of the state’s capacity to intimidate and abuse the protesters who have risen up. But the people were ready. The realization of protest power as a legitimate, direct route to political change feels new to this generation.
Rep. Will Hurd represents Texas’ 23rd district in Congress.
Today, we are seeing more demands of accountability by the American public because these atrocities are increasingly caught on video. With these videos, Americans are able to witness horrific acts impacting the African American community. As a result, leaders are finally being held accountable to take action faster in arresting and bringing bad actors to justice. Even with arrests happening faster, there still is so much more that must be done to prevent these murders from happening in the first place. We must look at the root of the problem and address the fact that black men and women are dying in police custody. There are real actions that must be taken to stop these atrocities. We still must ensure our justice system works equally for everyone.
Mark Bray is a history lecturer at Rutgers University and the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.
Mass protest against the police killing of black people is nothing new to the United States, but this time the president and his administration have attempted to discredit resistance by attributing it to “antifa,” the movement of militant anti-fascism that gained notoriety in conflicts with the far right starting in 2017. It is very likely that a small percentage of protesters belong to antifa groups. But given the unique conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic, where almost all protesters are expected by medical experts to wear masks, the kind of visual distinctions that have often differentiated protesters have largely dissipated. In this more fluid visual landscape of resistance, where almost everyone is masked up, the allegation that destruction is being wrought by antifa threatens to expand government and police repression to everyone out on the streets.
David Greenberg, a professor of history and journalism and media studies at Rutgers, is a contributing editor at Politico Magazine and author, most recently, Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency.
During the 2016 campaign, many people warned that Donald Trump’s election would corrode the norms and standards that uphold civil society. These norms include the long-held taboo against condoning or celebrating violence. Trump has consistently flouted that taboo, whether fomenting violence at his rallies or rationalizing it at Charlottesville. What’s remarkable about the demonstrations over George Floyd’s killing and police brutality against black Americans more generally is how widespread the justifications of violence on all sides—whether by police officers, rogue protesters or looters—have become.
We saw some of this in the 1960s—it was given the name “radical chic”—but it never became pervasive throughout society. Today, while most Americans no doubt still believe violence is wrong, it’s much harder to find clear-eyed, full-throated denunciations of it in our discourse. It’s not just Trump calling for protesters to be “dominated,” or even New York Mayor Bill de Blasio semi-defending cops who charged a crowd with an SUV. As radicals, opportunists and provocateurs have hijacked legitimate, peaceful protests, all manner of commentators in the media, posters on social media and callers to radio shows have struggled to criticize destructive or dangerous acts in straightforward, uncompromised language—as if it were a difficult thing simultaneously to understand and acknowledge the reasons for frustration and rage and also to draw the line at lawlessness.
The misguided apologists for violence, across the political spectrum, are by no means the moral equivalent of Trump, who has deliberately fanned the flames of racial and cultural division; they might even be said to have been influenced, indirectly, by him. But the inability to forthrightly condemn wanton destruction from so many different precincts represents a worrisome development that might make the damage we are doing to our social fabric especially hard to repair.
Clayborne Carson is professor of American history and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.
My entire adult life has been shaped by my experiences as a teenager attending the 1963 March on Washington and then as a student activist working with the Non-Violent Action Committee in south-central Los Angeles during the Watts rebellion of 1965. I have witnessed a succession of massive protests intended to expose the contradiction between American ideals and the realities of racial oppression. I never expected that my grandchildren would witness police executions more than 50 years later. While the police in Los Angeles behaved with even more impunity back then—killing with lead bullets, rather than injuring with the rubber substitutes we often see today—change has clearly not come nearly quickly nor substantially enough. The major point that must be made today is that law-and-order politics has worked in America for decades and should not be underestimated. The outburst of riots of the 1960s fed into the reactionary law-and-order rhetoric that was potently weaponized through the Nixon, Reagan and even Clinton presidencies to facilitate the militarization of the police and mass incarceration. While we now have the benefit of hindsight, I worry that we have not made the most of it, and that the current situation too closely mirrors the conditions that enabled the rise of law-and-order politics in the first place. President Trump has read this playbook, and protesters must adopt strategies that prevent it from playing out once again.
In both his first and last speeches, Martin Luther King Jr. defended the fundamental “right to protest for right.” The peaceful protesters around this country have admirably acted upon this right and accented the urgent need to correct the unconscionable injustices of this country. Yet the advantages that come with decentralized organizing that have scaled up these protests so rapidly also come with disadvantages that need to be overcome if these protests are to produce progressive change. Widespread protests, if successful, provoke a reactionary law-and-order politics that equates protest and civil disobedience with lawlessness and rioting that must be contained at all costs—even human life. Protesters today face the same challenge that protesters of the 1960s faced: how to sustain dynamic grassroots organizing while also allowing for the emergence of new spokespersons who can clarify the broader movement. Contrary to the mythology of the civil rights movement, King did not speak with uncontested authority, and among the plurality of leaders, his voice did not always lead. But this is the risk of leadership: Activists will decide whether to follow or reject those who attempt to speak for movements. Whether peaceful protesters can unite around a clear set of nonviolent demands, including police disarmament, will determine the strength with which law-and-order fearmongering can be defeated. As before, the consequences of leadership failure will fall predominantly on the black community, and it is the responsibility of nonblack protesters to recognize this if they hope to build lasting multiracial coalitions.
Peniel E. Joseph is founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor of history. His most recent book is The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
There are several marked differences between the recent mass protests across America and previous uprisings, including the Black Lives Matter demonstrations from 2014-15 and the long, hot summers of unrest between 1963 and 1968. This time around, the country simultaneously faces large-scale unemployment wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as racial disparities in the impact of the virus, which likely fueled some protesters’ frustration. Technology also has given the country widespread access to George Floyd’s grueling, almost nine-minute suffocation at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. Millions of Americans witnessed Floyd’s death on social media almost immediately, and, in response, a diverse cross-section of the population—African Americans, as well as white, Latinx, Asian and indigenous allies—took to the streets to demand not only justice for Floyd, but a fundamental reimagining of American democracy.
The protesters who have turned out over the past week also seem to be more aware of structural racism in the past, and prepared to combat it. Many seem to recognize that the criminal justice system is just one part of a panorama of structures of oppression across this country, from the criminalization of the poor to widespread, unequal access to housing, nutritious food, employment, environmental safety, health care, clean air, water and citizenship. Organizations from BLM to prison abolitionists have come to the table with more than just outrage; they have sharp, clear-eyed, radical proposals to defund the criminal justice system and redirect resources that currently are spent punishing, incarcerating and killing black communities into investments that will allow these neighborhoods to thrive. This moment and the energy it has inspired across the country offers a generational opportunity to achieve black dignity and full citizenship by ending institutional racism and white supremacy in America once and for all.
Walter Olson is senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies.
Since the Long Hot Summer of 1967, or even the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992, the feds have showered local police departments with billions of dollars in armored carriers, grenade launchers and other war-zone gear. Some was military surplus; others, shiny new stuff paid for by Homeland Security grants in anticipation of foreign terror threats. Give a department new gear, and odds are it will find a way to use it. (Well, not always, as when police in Louisville were given bodycams but failed to turn them on during a shooting that left a black business owner dead.)
The various layers of armor, mechanization and remote operation that we see today alter the relationship between police and protesters from one of the police as neighbors who are defending communities to something that, fairly or not, begins to look like an impersonal army of occupation. That worsens social divisions. We all saw the videos of tension being defused by police engaging the crowd in conversation. It didn't always work, but sometimes it did. Put the officer in an armored vehicle or helicopter, and that’s not as likely to happen.
The need for now is to stop the violence on all sides. When things settle down, we’ll want to study which style of policing worked better in calming unrest: the kind where warrior cops in sci-fi garb occupy terrain, or the kind where recognizable humans, the sort who can read each others’ expressions, face off in the public square.
Nancy Isenberg is professor of history at Louisiana State University, author of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America and coauthor of The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality.
What is extraordinary about the latest wave of protest is the president’s outrageous call for “domination” in encouraging a violent response. As singularly destructive as his language appears, even this is not without a historical parallel. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover labeled as “criminals” the 20,000 veterans (white and black alike) who marched on Washington to demand their bonus pay. When the Bonus Bill failed in the Senate, Hoover called out the U.S. military, armed with machine guns, to use tear gas and chase the remaining 2,000 men and their families out of Washington. Trump, likewise, used the word “criminals” on Monday night, the same word he infamously used in his campaign to tar undocumented migrants crossing the U.S. southern border. “Criminals” intentionally evokes racial and class imagery: the riotous mob, the street thug, whom Trump regards as a deviant, inferior underclass that must be beaten down. That is what is new here: Trump takes things beyond Hoover in that he openly revels in being a bully and embraces the Social Darwinian fantasy of the strong over the weak. This is an ominous, poisonous twist in an already fraught history.
Kay C. James is president of The Heritage Foundation.
Fifty years ago, I was a college student at Hampton Institute (now University). The civil rights movement was growing, and I was proud to be a part of it. We sat peacefully at lunch counters, walked across bridges locking arms with our white friends, participated in bus boycotts and garbage strikes. Today’s chaos, riots and criminal behavior are a stark difference from those peaceful demonstrations. The events painfully unfolding before our eyes reveal that America’s race issues are not fully resolved.
For more than 50 years, I have denounced violence as a tool to bring about change—I believed it then, and I do today. Sadly, riots over this past week have damaged many of the businesses that provide work, groceries, services and necessities in our minority communities. While we can and should sympathize with the deep pain that those in the black community are feeling, we must never be complacent in the face of violence.
That’s why it is my most fervent prayer that George Floyd’s tragic death leads us to a better, safer and more unified country. We have made tremendous progress in my lifetime. This difficult moment in our history gives us an opportunity to get this right and to live up to the American ideal. Conservative principles on individual freedom and liberty do far more to promote human flourishing and lift people out of poverty—and it’s those principles that can lead to a different outcome in the future than the failures of the past.
Michael Nutter is the former mayor of Philadelphia.
In the 1960s and 70s, people had heard about the Vietnam War on the news, but something felt different when they saw our American soldiers returning home in body bags and the students shot at Kent State on TV, which was still somewhat new in most American households. People had heard about the civil rights struggles down South, but something felt different when they saw on TV the brutal beatings at lunch counters, the beatings on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the dogs attacking citizens seeking the right to vote, the black bodies swaying from trees, the recovered bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the riots afterward. This time, something feels different because, while some Americans merely heard about George Floyd, the vast majority of us saw him get killed on video by a uniformed police officer, who, in broad daylight, put his knee on Floyd’s neck as he begged for his life, gasped for breath and felt the life slip out of his body. America can’t un-see that, can’t act like it didn’t happen.
It certainly feels different this time, but it will only be different if good people of all of God’s shades of the rainbow, especially white people, decide they have seen enough to stop the violence against black people, to stop the discrimination in employment, to stop the prejudice in housing, to stop excessively incarcerating us, to stop denying us high-quality health care, to stop underfunding our children’s education, to stop fighting against a livable wage and to stop killing us on the streets of America. It better be different this time, for the sake of all of us, our children, and the country. America, you’ve heard our pleas, you’ve seen our deaths. Make it different this time, finally.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss is professor of education and sociology, director of research at the Center for University Excellence, and director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University.
One of the differences in the recent protests over George Floyd’s death is that they have drawn a larger and more diverse cross-section of society than ever—including armed far-right extremist groups who have appeared at dozens of the protests across the country. Three self-identified members of the anti-government “boogaloo” scene—which calls for a violent insurrection and civil war—were arrested on terrorism-related charges after trying to incite violence at the Las Vegas protests. The FBI’s Washington field office warned that far-right individuals have issued social media calls for attacks on federal agents and the use of automatic weapons against protesters. Members of another far-right group were photographed in Portland dressed in all-black clothing reminiscent of antifa, presumably in an effort to blame violence on leftist groups—a stance that has also been taken by the U.S. administration, despite a lack of evidence.
Far-right groups are showing up at these protests for many reasons. Some are clearly trying to spark violence, either in the hopes of accelerating a civil or race war, or to try and divert blame onto anti-fascist groups or other protesters. Other groups have expressed support for the protests because they see a shared goal of dismantling government and attacking the legitimacy of state institutions. Either way, having heavily armed far-right groups and individuals at these protests creates a risk of planned or unpredictable violence that endangers peaceful protesters and could spark an even greater tragedy. Coming on the heels of armed far-right protesters at Second Amendment rallies and state capitol protests against Covid-19 shelter-in-place orders, the mobilization of violent far-right extremists at the George Floyd protests must be understood as a critical threat to public safety.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of history, race and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of The Condemnation of Blackness.
From some vantage points, the protests might appear more controlled than what we saw after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. This time, officials and the media have clearly defined “peaceful” protesters who have a right to take to the streets, versus rioters, looters and extremists who don’t. The sheer number of daytime white protesters alongside black community members has also changed the political calculus, perhaps even limiting overzealous, militarized displays of force.
Yet, given the nationwide scale of protests happening now, there are many more rubber bullets, tear gas canisters and flash grenades flying toward protesters than in years past. There are also reports across different cities of excessive uses of force, like two NYPD SUVs that drove into a crowd of dozens of protesters for blocking traffic. In Atlanta, six officers were charged after pulling over and tasing a black couple—students at Morehouse and Spelman colleges—who were trying to leave a protest after curfew. It seems that the police have been more violent and aggressive, particularly when day turns to night, and especially in response to those who deliberately destroy property. From the White House to governors’ mansions, officials are branding after-hours protesters violent criminals and calling for law and order. “New York was lost to the looters, thugs, Radical Left, and all others forms of Lowlife & Scum,” President Trump tweeted on June 2.
There’s a profound irony in this latest moment of civil unrest. As officials try to protect property and defend people’s right to protest peacefully for victims of police violence, the police risk killing even more people. It doesn’t make much sense, and only demonstrates how much state violence and the threat of it still rests at the heart of American democracy.
Omar Wasow is an assistant professor of politics at Princeton.
There are two ways that the media most commonly portrays protests—either as claims for rights or as crimes—and these simplified narratives have a powerful impact. In the 1960s, when the national media were the key conduit by which the concerns of civil rights protesters became part of the national discourse, there was a close, observable relationship between how the media framed the protests and public opinion. When news outlets portrayed nonviolent civil disobedience as part of a fight for rights, the public, in polls, identified civil rights as the most important challenge facing the country. But when protests turned violent and headlines used words like “riots,” the public began to identify crime as the country’s most pressing problem.
The two common media narratives are still very much alive today. At the same time, I have observed a deeper level of sophistication and nuance in some of the mainstream media coverage of the current wave of unrest. Now that journalists have so much more video footage of these chaotic events, that documentary evidence can serve as the basis for reporting that avoids the deference to authority that was so common in the civil rights era, instead challenging officials to answer for acts that we all can see on screen. It also helps that the current generation of reporters, overall, has a deeper understanding of race in this country than in the past.
While we are only in the very early stages of understanding how the current coverage might sway public opinion, there was one sign this week: A Monmouth poll found that a majority of Americans think the anger that led to the protests of the past week was fully justified, even if respondents didn’t agree with the actions the protesters have taken. This finding likely reflects both better media coverage and a country that, thanks largely to the work of activists, is more informed about racial inequality.
Heather Boushey is president and CEO of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and author of Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It.
What’s different about the current protests is the backdrop of a pandemic that has laid bare the fragilities at our nation’s core. For half a century, we’ve allowed economic inequality to rise, which has made the country more susceptible to both the coronavirus and its devastating economic effects. The United States is unique in our failure to ensure that every worker has access to paid sick leave and health care. It didn’t help that the current administration failed to act quickly or effectively, as the president focused on stock prices rather than ensuring that every worker had the protective gear they needed to do their jobs safely.
Of course, racial inequality is at the heart of American inequality. To take just one statistic, the median wealth held by white families today is 10 times that of black families. Now, black Americans, many of them essential workers, have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19. The protests have shined a light on how government has destroyed black people’s ability to trust it to act on their behalf—whether to protect them from disease or from police violence. Only policymakers, when fueled by the power of movements, can take the necessary action to create the institutions that can act on behalf of black families and the common good.
Corey Pegues, a former New York Police Department commander and professor of criminology, is author of Once A Cop.
The difference this time is that, almost across the board, police officials around America are denouncing the murder of George Floyd. That is unprecedented. Usually, the response to a police-initiated homicide is to “toe the police line,” wait for all of the evidence to come out and do not dare criticize the officer(s) involved. That type of reaction has historically led to fractured relationships with the black and brown citizens of this great nation, and it has led to violent protests.
Yet, even with some police taking such a dramatic new stance this time, I still do not think that there will be any substantial changes in policing. The only way you can change policing is by either changing the people in charge or changing how officers think, and I doubt that either of these things will be done. Replacing every police officer or commander is practically impossible. To shift the mindset of the officers patrolling the streets of America—from suspicion of black and brown people to respect regardless of race, creed, color, sexual orientation, etc.—will take a monumental hands-on approach with constant checks and balances. If police departments around the country were up to the task, there wouldn’t have been another “I can’t breathe” police murder.
Three things are needed to change police culture: First, cops who commit crimes against the community should be held personally liable; no more hiding behind the city or county to foot the lawsuit bill. Second, those same cops should be subject to perp walks. And finally, there needs to be serious federal legislation targeted both at accountability and at fixing or breaking up police culture as we currently know it.
Keisha N. Blain is an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, a 2019-20 W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University and author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom.
From the era of slavery to the present, the presence of the police in black communities across the nation has yielded dreadful consequences. Black people are disproportionately killed by the police; in the past few years alone, thousands of black men and women, many unarmed, have lost their lives in these situations. And officers are rarely charged with killing unarmed black people. Activists have decried these developments and employed a range of political strategies to draw public awareness—most notably, the Black Lives Matter movement, which in 2014 initiated a wave of protests across the nation and the globe to confront state-sanctioned violence.
While the recent police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade lit the spark, the 2020 rebellion represents a continuum of the Black Lives Matter movement—as well as earlier movements for black rights and freedom in the United States. The current uprisings must be understood within this historical context.
What is new in this moment, however, is Covid-19, which has exacerbated already difficult conditions for black people in this country. One recent report revealed that Covid-19 infection rates in predominantly black communities were three times higher than the rates of infection in predominantly white communities. These social and health factors have fanned the flames of an ongoing issue that runs deep in the fabric of American life: police violence. The combined forces of the fight against police violence and the devastating effects of the coronavirus have ignited a sense of deep urgency among protesters.
Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America, author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America and co-host of the podcast Politics in Question.
Many have drawn comparisons between the events of 2020 and the unrest and tumult of 1968, pointing out similarities and differences in the events themselves and the personalities involved. But most important is the fact that the structures of American political conflict and media are fundamentally different today, in ways that make reconciliation much more difficult.
In 1968, civil rights were not a partisan issue. Both parties contained a mix of social liberals and social conservatives, and landmark civil rights legislation to end housing discrimination in 1968 was bipartisan (with a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats supporting it, actually). Whatever divisions existed in society then, partisan conflict didn’t echo them. Rather, parties provided a forum for their resolution. Today, questions of racial justice divide the parties, creating a hyperpartisan conflict that echoes and reinforces the conflict in the streets: casting police vs. protesters as a red vs. blue issue, and amplifying our hyperpartisan politics.
In 1968, almost everybody also saw the same nightly news on one of just three national networks and/or read the same local newspaper. Whether they agreed or disagreed with the protests, everybody at least was working with the same set of facts. Today, in an age of media fracture, Democrats and Republicans see almost entirely different news, with different images and different emphases, amplifying and exacerbating the partisan conflict. Without a shared set of images and a shared set of facts, it’s very difficult to come to the common understanding necessary for an agreement.
Taken together, these two differences suggest no easy resolution—just more zero-sum escalation that threatens the shared sense of fairness on which democracy depends.
Christopher S. Parker is professor of political science at the University of Washington and author of the forthcoming Great White Hope: Donald Trump, Race, and the Crisis of American Democracy, with Matthew A. Barreto.
This time could be different, but the jury—at least for me—remains out. It’s easy for one to believe that the sum of recent events will lead to more enduring racial progress. Race-based health disparities rendered visible by the current pandemic. Check. Blue on black violence. Check. The election of a racist president. Check. By virtue of the sheer weight of these combined events, how could one possibly gainsay the proposition that the current moment will result in more permanent racial progress? Here’s how. Race-based health disparities have always existed; the pandemic merely reminds us of this. Blue on black violence is as old as the republic; this isn’t even the first time police brutality catalyzed nationwide unrest. The latter half of the 1960s attests to this. And, of course, racist presidents have long existed, too (does Woodrow Wilson ring a bell?).
Nonetheless, I think it’s possible that the present conflagration might represent an inflection point. The potential to make this moment different is, I submit, the so-called white moderate, a term deployed by Martin Luther King Jr. in the Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963. Moderate white people assumed a perch in no man’s land during the civil rights movement; they weren’t practicing white supremacists, but they weren’t racial progressives, either. Basically, they refused to take a side. For this reason, King suggested that if they weren’t part of the solution, they were part of the problem. In the present context, moderate white people are those who recognize that racism is wrong but choose to do nothing about it, while ultimately benefitting from white supremacy. However, recent evidence suggests that moderate whites might be ready to break with President Trump’s blatant racism. Not only Democrats, but a majority of political independents in the United States say they are repulsed by Trump’s racism. This represents a shift; 46 percent of independents supported Trump in 2016.
Only time will tell whether the president will continue to alienate white folks in the middle. If he does, Americans finally might move toward an anti-racist majority, hopefully for the foreseeable future.
Mark Holden is former senior vice president and general counsel of Koch Industries.
As a committed and passionate criminal justice reform advocate for decades, I see this as a critical moment, precisely because we have made so much progress over the past 15 years. Changes in the states and at the federal level have made our communities safer, our systems more just and outcomes more focused on second chances for those who have transgressed. Instead of the failed tough-on-crime policies of the 1980s and 1990s, which were based on politics and race-baiting, many parts of the country have embraced smart-on-crime measures focused on data and evidence that have led to a system emphasizing rehabilitation, restoration and redemption.
Sadly, a year and a half after President Trump signed the First Step Act into law, we are experiencing the worst riots since 1968, sparked by a Minneapolis police officer killing George Floyd in cold blood and in broad daylight. To their credit, some are responding by focusing on police reforms that work for both communities and law enforcement. I welcome such reforms, but no law or proclamation will completely solve the deeper issues of racial inequality, racism and a lack of equal opportunities in our society. Until we address those underlying issues, caused by a two-tiered society and systems that don’t work for most Americans, I fear there will always be more senseless tragedies, such as the shooting death of David McAtee, an African American man, earlier this week in Louisville. As individuals, we must look within our own hearts for change. But we also must act on what is in our hearts.
Simon Balto is assistant professor of history and African American studies at the University of Iowa and author of Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power.
There are undeniably many things that are fundamentally different about what’s happening now in 2020. But we also shouldn’t lose the central plot, which is the relentless constancy across time of police violence against black people. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation were it not for that fact. Whether you’re looking at the protests right now or at the Ferguson and Baltimore rebellions of the last decade or at the hundreds of uprisings in the 1960s, the sparks that set the fire are not mysteries. The Kerner Commission report of 1968, which investigated the causes of the urban uprisings that had swept the nation in previous years, unambiguously said that the catalyzing incident in almost every single case was one involving police action—usually violent—against black people. The same is true of Ferguson, and the same is true now. So, while we can analyze and debate what’s changed, we shouldn’t lose sight of what’s precisely, remorselessly, depressingly the same—since it’s the most important thing in all of this.
Chuck Wexler is executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum.
Six years after Ferguson, many people say nothing has changed with the police. But organizations like ours have spent those years reengineering police training on use of force, taking 25 American police chiefs to Scotland to learn about that country’s tactics for resolving incidents involving people with knives, developing guiding principles on use of force for agencies to adopt (because the United States has no national standards), and creating a new training program on deescalation that many departments have implemented. As a result, the culture of policing has begun to change slowly, as agencies formally recognize the sanctity of human life, publicly acknowledge failures, establish a duty to intervene when officers see another officer using (or on the verge of using) excessive or unnecessary force, and honor officers who successfully deescalate difficult incidents. With nearly 700,000 law enforcement officers spread out over almost 18,000 agencies, change comes slowly, and the protests we’re now witnessing remind us how much further we have to go. Above all, police departments must instill in officers the belief that intervening to prevent excessive force saves lives and careers.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. Her forthcoming book is Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present.
The combination of two things makes our current moment different: coronavirus and an authoritarian-minded president. Both are novel; they uproot old ways of doing things and behave in unexpected ways. Both imperil populations and work through contagion—one spreads disease, the other hatred and moral corruption—and wrench society into a new phase. Last year saw an extraordinary wave of demonstrations around the world against worsening economic inequity and rising authoritarianism. Covid-19 dampened these protests in early 2020, but now they are back with a vengeance, this time radiating forth from America, where police brutality against people of color, embraced by President Trump, has driven many to assemble. With Trump now mobilizing the American military against its own people, in the authoritarian tradition, and a second wave of coronavirus likely to hit in late summer or fall, our society will be sorely tested. But I believe that new forms of connection and a new appreciation for the values of solidarity and social justice will emerge.
Vanita Gupta is president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She led the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division from 2014-2017.
In recent weeks, the crisis of police killing black people has, again, escalated to a boiling point. These stolen lives are part of a long history of impunity against black people—one now causing outpourings of grief and generational pain across the nation. In 2020, this police brutality is happening against a backdrop of profound inequity, as people of color bear the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic. Policymakers continue to deprive our communities of essential resources to thrive, and so it is predictable that communities of color have been hardest hit by the disease. The confluence of these two pandemics—structural racism and Covid-19—along with a looming election in which one candidate has effectively declared war on democracy make this moment entirely unique.
Leaders, together with communities, now must envision a new paradigm for public safety that respects the human rights of all people. That means not just changing policing practices, but shrinking the footprint of the criminal legal system, including police, in black and brown people’s lives. And it means shifting our approach to public safety away from exclusive investments in criminalization and policing, and toward investments in economic opportunity, education, health care and other public benefits. This paradigm not only furthers equity, but also constitutes effective policy: When we stop using criminal “justice” policy as social policy, we make communities safer and more prosperous.
Abdul El-Sayed, the former health commissioner of Detroit, is an epidemiologist and progressive activist. He is the author of Healing Politics.
First, let’s not forget that black folks have been being murdered by police for a long time. What’s been different in these past 10 years is that almost everyone has internet-enabled smartphones in their pockets to film it. And that has changed our national consciousness. The killing of George Floyd came on the heels of Breonna Taylor’s killing, the news of Ahmaud Arbery’s killing and the absurd weaponization of race by Amy Cooper against Chris Cooper in Central Park. These events pulsed to a crescendo.
Second, you cannot divorce this from Covid-19, which found an all-too-common path to black communities, killing black folks and destroying their livelihoods at far higher rates. Almost all of us saw the Floyd video, though it was unbearable to watch. Now, imagine watching that video after having lost your job—or maybe worse, having been forced to go out and work for $11 or $12 an hour, knowing you could be putting yourself or your family at risk. Imagine if you lost your aunt or uncle—wondering if by going to work during the worst of the pandemic you might have infected them in the first place. Imagine hearing from your neighbors, coworkers and loved ones that it was happening to them, too. These were the experiences I was hearing from too many black folks in communities like Detroit, which were some of the hardest hit by Covid-19 across America. Imagine knowing that all this—the police brutality, the low-wage jobs, the coronavirus—all of it was far worse in your community, simply because of the color of your skin. We have to recognize that black folks aren’t just excluded from the “public” in public safety—but also from public health, public utilities (Flint), public education and so on.
And finally, black folks have been concerned about radicalized police violence long before Floyd’s death—but what’s different this time is that white people are showing the willingness to both stand up against it and follow the lead of black community leaders and organizers. Let’s only hope this ends in systemic reforms to the ways that black folks have been excluded and precluded in our interactions, our economy, our culture and our society.
Monica C. Bell is associate professor of law and sociology at Yale University.
I cannot yet make a case that the current wave of events is significantly different from previous moments when black people and allies have taken to the streets, risking life and health, to fight for justice in the wake of state-sponsored violence. There are differences, of course. But what happens now and going forward will determine whether and how this time is truly different.
Most centrally, there has to be a deep change in the role of policing in the everyday lives of all communities. We cannot focus only on the evil behavior of the officers who killed Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and so many others who have lost their lives to police on videotape. Policing is not a freestanding injustice—it is both a consequence and a cause of poverty, segregation, lack of educational opportunity and voter suppression. The protest movement and the political process must continue until there are fundamental changes—for example, holding police departments accountable for reproducing residential segregation, removing municipal police from schools, cutting funding from police and redistributing it to more robust community and social support sectors, and eliminating criminal laws that authorize police to be involved in matters where their presence is unnecessary. Well-meaning police officers must also recognize that the role of the police in American society has become too central, and should join in the fight for structural change.
While I cannot be sure this will work this time, I have hope. For one thing, there is reason to believe that ideas about how to change the structures of policing and public safety are influencing local political leaders, those who have the most direct power over policing. This is why it is so important for movement politics to remain connected with electoral politics. Second, beyond government, there is reason to believe that people from all walks of life, including white people, are recognizing that the police can be too powerful and can have too many resources, with too little oversight. These are promising developments. But if we do not commit to the longer journey of transforming raised consciousness into structural change, the devastating cycle of violence-video-hashtag-outrage-forgetting will continue.
Lead photo, top row (L to R): Stephen Voss/Redux Pictures; M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico; David Butow/Redux Pictures; Timothy Fadek/Redux Pictures. Middle row (L to R): Stephen Voss/Redux Pictures; Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images; Erik McGregor/Getty Images; David Butow/Redux Pictures. Bottom row (L to R): Shawn Thew/Getty Images; Brent Stirton/Getty Images; M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico; Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.
