Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 66
XIV. 2020: A Global Reckoning on Race
DEMANDING AN END TO ANTI-BLACK STATE VIOLENCE
The spring and summer of 2020 have given us a glimpse
of that future. The racial uprisings taking place across the
country in the wake of the execution of George Floyd
are heartbreaking, tragic and inspiring. They have been
sparked by Black death and suffering — and by those who
refuse to accept them.
McClain and placed him in a carotid (strangle) hold.
McClain vomited several times and told the police “I’m
sorry, I wasn’t trying to do that, I can’t breathe correctly.”
He lost consciousness and was given a powerful sedative
from paramedics. En route to the hospital, McClain went
into cardiac arrest. He died several days later.6
But the global embrace of Black Lives Matter has drawn
the ire of President Trump, U.S. Attorney General William
Barr and many Republicans in power.1 Why? Because this
response threatens our nation’s white-racial hierarchy.
The murder of Floyd lit a fuse around the world against
police brutality. And all of this has happened against the
backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, which has laid bare
the destructive impacts of racist oppression and policies.
It was never the goal of a settler-colonial nation to become
a multiracial democracy. And as we have discussed
throughout this essay, our nation’s dominant white media
system has played a central role in preventing any kind of
progress on this front.
And at the time of Floyd’s death, Black people were nearly
three times more likely to die of COVID-19 than white
people.7 There are many reasons for this, including a lack
of health-care coverage or access to quality care, and a lack
of sick leave at jobs that are low-paying but public-facing.8
This lack of progress has been brought into sharp relief in
2020, as the current racial uprisings might make up the
largest movement our nation has ever experienced.2
The pandemic has also had grave economic consequences:
Black businesses were far less likely to receive a smallbusiness loan as part of the COVID-19 stimulus package.
This contributed to a 41-percent decline in Black-owned
businesses between February and April of this year.9 And
by May, when the uprisings started, Black unemployment
had risen to 16.8 percent — 17.6 percent for Latinx
workers — while the white unemployment rate had fallen
from 14.9 percent in April to 12.4 percent. But the white
unemployment figure is likely overstated because it
includes white Latinx people.10
The uprisings have brought greater attention to the death
of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor. Louisville police shot
and killed Taylor in March 2020 after they broke into
her apartment in the middle of the night, claiming they
were searching for drugs. None were found. Taylor, an
emergency-room technician, was shot at least five times
and did not receive medical attention for 20 minutes.3 One
of the three officers involved has been fired.
While Taylor’s family called for criminal charges to be
brought against all three officers,4 a grand jury chose
to charge just one of the detectives with “wanton
endangerment” for the bullets fired into adjacent
apartments.5
In other words, no one has been criminally charged or
held accountable for the murder of Breonna Taylor.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how government
policies at all levels have failed to ensure that our
communities receive the resources we need to erase
structural disparities and the harms that they cause.
Instead, city, state and federal governments have invested
an enormous amount of taxpayer money into policing
Black people. This is why the Movement for Black Lives
has called for defunding the police and shifting to a
“massive investment in a shared vision of community
safety that actually works.”11
The uprisings have also brought greater attention to the
death of 23-year-old Elijah McClain in Aurora, Colorado.
In August 2019, the police detained McClain as he was
walking home from a store in the evening, after receiving
a call that he looked “looked sketchy.” The police tackled
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