On 25 May, a 46-year-old African-American man named George Floyd was murdered by white policeman Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, MN. For over 8 minutes, Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck, ignoring his pleas that he could not breathe. In the days since, the world has been upended. Protests have taken place across the United States of America, London, Berlin and beyond against the systemic racism that permeates not just American society, but societies globally. Away from the protest epicentres of downtown Minneapolis and Brooklyn, social media has become charged with cries for anti-racist solidarity—search the hashtag ‘Black Lives Matter’ on Instagram, for one, and over 10 million posts crop up.
While the dismantling of racist systems is by no means something that can happen overnight, somehow—or at least one can hope—this moment feels different. Against the backdrop of the despair brought about by coronavirus, the loss of some 40 million jobs in the US and the further intensifying of a desperately unequal American society (African-Americans are dying at three times the rate of white Americans of Covid-19), there is the sense that no one—black, non-black POC or white—is willing to stand for such abuses any longer. Change must happen, and soon.
If you are unsure what you can do now to help, take time to listen, read, research and donate, if you can. Here are some resources, posts and information that we’ve been finding helpful these past few days.
Where to express your support and donate to:
Sign the Justice for George Floyd petition at Change.org. here
Official George Floyd Memorial Fund here.
Donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund here.
Follow and donate to Reclaim the Block here and Black Visions Collective here—organisations committed to reform of the police and city council in Minneapolis.
Donate to National Bail Out—a black-led and black-centred collective of abolitionist organisers, lawyers and activists building a community-based movement.
Support National Bail Fund Network to support local bail relief across America here.
Follow and support Black Lives Matter here. On their website, donations are divided into specific categories here. There is also a list of educational materials here.
Suggestions on what articles to read:
Destructive Power of Despair—By Charles M. Blow for The New York Times
“Despair has an incredible power to initiate destruction. It is exceedingly dangerous to assume that oppression and pain can be inflicted without consequence, to believe that the victim will silently absorb the injury and the wound will fade.
No, the injuries compound, particularly when there is no effort to alter the system doing the wounding, no avenue by which the aggrieved can seek justice.”
“If America wants peace it must be responsive in peacetime. You can’t demonize an athlete who peacefully takes a knee to protest against police brutality, labeling him a “son of a bitch,” as President Trump did, and then pine for peaceful protests now.
It seems that no form of protest has been effective in this fight for justice. It seems that what the public and the power structure want is a continuation of the status quo. They want stillness and passivity. They want obedience. They want your suffering to be silent, your trauma to be tranquil.”
In Defense of Looting—by Vicky Osterweil from The New Inquiry (from 2014 following the police killing of Michael Brown)
“Though the Civil Rights movement won many battles, it lost the war. Mass incarceration, the fact that black wealth and black-white inequality are at the same place they were at the start of the civil rights movement, that many US cities are more segregated now than they were in the sixties: no matter what “colorblind” liberals would say, racial justice has not been won, white supremacy has not been overturned, racism is not over. In fact, anti-black racism remains the foundational organizing principle of this country.”
“Looting is extremely dangerous to the rich (and most white people) because it reveals, with an immediacy that has to be moralized away, that the idea of private property is just that: an idea, a tenuous and contingent structure of consent, backed up by the lethal force of the state. When rioters take territory and loot, they are revealing precisely how, in a space without cops, property relations can be destroyed and things can be had for free.”
“The history of the police in America is the history of black people being violently prevented from threatening white people’s property rights.”
An American Uprising—By David Remnick from The New Yorker
“What also makes the video so devastating is its familiarity, the way it rhymes, in its stark cruelty, with countless acts of racist violence through the years and decades.”
“Perhaps the deepest frustration of thinking about 1968 and 2020 is the time elapsed, the opportunities squandered, the lip service paid.”
““To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep,” James Baldwin wrote, in 1978, and the same could be said of our moment.”
“King considered the question not in the spirit of endorsement but of comprehension. Urban riots, he said, using the language of the day, “may be deplored, but . . . they are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest.” Even looting, he insisted, is an act of catharsis, a form of “shocking” the white community “by abusing property rights.” Then King quoted Victor Hugo to deepen his point: “If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.””
The American Nightmare—By Ibram X. Kendi in The Atlantic.
“Mayors issue curfews. Governors rattle their sabers. The National Guard arrives to protect property and police. Where was the National Guard when you faced violent police officers, violent white terrorists, the violence of racial health disparities, the violence of COVID-19—all the racist power and policy and ideas that kept the black experience in the American nightmare for 400 years?”
“Americans should be asking: Why are so many unarmed black people being killed by police while armed white people are simply arrested? Why are officials addressing violent crime in poorer neighborhoods by adding more police instead of more jobs? Why are black (and Latino) people during this pandemic less likely to be working from home; less likely to be insured; more likely to live in trauma-care deserts, lacking access to advanced emergency care; and more likely to live in polluted neighborhoods? The answer is what the Frederick Hoffmans of today refuse to believe: racism.”
Of Course There Are Protests. The State Is Failing Black People—By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor from The New York Times
“As mostly white public officials try to get things back to normal as fast as possible, the discussions about the pandemic’s devastating consequences to black people melt into the background, consequences which become accepted as a “new normal” we will have to live or die with.”
“Instead of using this monumental crisis to change the conditions feeding the rapid rate of black deaths, the armed agents of the state continue their petty, insouciant policing. Even seemingly innocuous instructions for social distancing become new excuses for the police to harass African-Americans. In New York, blacks made up a staggering 93 percent of coronavirus-related arrests. There are similar racial disparities in Chicago. At a time when police departments have pledged to arrest fewer people to stem the spread of the virus in local jails and in the name of preserving public health, African-Americans remain in their cross hairs. After all, why were the police arresting George Floyd for forgery, a “crime” of poverty committed by desperate low-wage workers, in the first place?”
Why You Need to Stop Saying “All Lives Matter—By Rachel Elizabeth Cargle for Harper’s Bazaar
“As Columbia Law Professor Kimberle Crenshaw explains, saying black lives matter “is simply aspirational;” it’s a rallying cry for a shift in statistical numbers that show that people who are black are twice as likely to be killed by a police officer while unarmed, compared to a white individual. According to a 2015 study, African-Americans died at the hands of police at a rate of 7.2 per million, while whites were killed at a rate of 2.9 per million.”
“Let me be clear: our stating that black lives matter doesn’t insinuate that other lives don’t. Of course all lives matter. That doesn’t even need to be said. But the fact that white people get so upset about the term black lives matter is proof that nothing can center the wellbeing and livelihoods of black bodies without white people assuming it is to their demise.”