Why these protests are different

There have been uprisings against police brutality and racism before, but this is the country at its exasperation point.

Americans have come out nightly in nearly every US city to demonstrate for the past week. They’ve been attacked by police, tear-gassed, and arrested, and have marched shoulder to shoulder amid a deadly pandemic. Their demand: an end to racism, police brutality, and the attitudes and policies that allow both to exist.

We have seen uprisings over racism and police brutality before, the most famous being the civil rights movement of the 1960s. There was sometimes a sense that those uprisings had brought on a great deal of progress in a short period and that the eradication of systemic racism would be a long-term project from then on out, with incremental changes ensuring the arc of the moral universe bent toward justice. The recent protest movement — though nascent — seems to reject that idea. The protesters want change now.

And it is easy to see why: Systemic racism takes a physical, existential toll on communities of color.

There is the police violence itself — most recently, against George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died after a white police officer pinned him down by the neck with his knee for nearly nine minutes. Among Floyd’s final words were “I can’t breathe,” mirroring the last moments of Eric Garner, another unarmed black man who died after a white police officer squeezed his neck for 15 seconds in 2014.

Floyd’s killing followed the killing of Breonna Taylor by police in her own home, the shooting of Sean Reed in Indiana, the shooting of Tony McDade in Florida, and the extrajudicial killing of Ahmaud Arbery by a white father and son, the former a retired police detective, now charged with murder and aggravated assault.