Great piece by Wilfred McClay in @FDRLST. It is impossible to see how truly exceptional this country is without learning about the history we rose above.. https://t.co/rJlwzB1pL9
— Emily Domenech (@ehdomenech) July 6, 2020
Blonde-rata! Are you loving @emrata's new look as much as we are? pic.twitter.com/WqQQLzYdIR
— Sports Illustrated Swimsuit (@SI_Swimsuit) July 1, 2020
Emrata is a work of art in BODY PAINT. 😍 https://t.co/Z0R8j8pI58 pic.twitter.com/gBhTX5uVkJ
— Sports Illustrated Swimsuit (@SI_Swimsuit) May 30, 2020
The police killing of George Floyd and resulting protests have led white Americans to reckon with racism more vigorously than at any moment in recent history. https://t.co/tpRqGetRha
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) June 28, 2020
GUALALA, Calif. — Mike Sexton is white and a Republican who lives in an affluent suburb of Fort Worth, where many neighbors back President Trump and some work in law enforcement. Rage wells up in his voice as he says that George Floyd, a Black man, was “basically lynched.”
Shawn Ashmore is an independent who lives nearby in east Dallas. He’s using Floyd’s killing to teach his young sons uncomfortable lessons about the privileges their family enjoys because they’re white — how, for instance, they’ll never fear for their lives during an encounter with the police the way some Black men do.Still more.
Lisa Joakimides lives in rural Northern California and considers herself a well-meaning Democrat. After the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Joakimides, who is white, convinced herself that America was finally making amends for its history of mistreating Black people.
As Joakimides got down on both knees to honor Floyd at a roadside demonstration in early June, she wondered how she could have been so naive.
Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, captured in witness videos showing then-Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, has led white Americans to call out racism against Black Americans more vigorously than at any moment in recent memory. And it’s prompting many white people to think more deeply about the color of their own skin.
Why now? Chicago-based sociology professor Jacqueline Battalora believes that after three wearying months of social isolation and economic upheaval brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, Floyd’s killing was yet another blow to the illusions of safety, security and equality that many white people harbor about America.
“The police are fair; institutions are fair — white people have been so happy to believe those things,” said Battalora, a former police officer and author of “Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today.” “What this signals is that a good chunk of white people now have some recognition that something’s not right.”
For Sexton, Ashmore and Joakimides, the killing of Floyd and outpourings of rage have forced them to see that expressions of sympathy and displays of solidarity with Black people are only the beginning. America won’t change its racist ways, they say, unless white people use this period of protest and reflection to change, too.
What’s different this time, Sexton said, is that white people have gained a better sense of where that outrage comes from, and how insulated they are from the racial injustices that provoke it.
Sexton, 45, said he can’t sit on the sidelines of the protest movement, or shy away from the national conversation about racism and police brutality, simply because he votes red instead of blue.
“It’s not right versus left,” he said. “It’s right versus wrong.”
Sexton said he wasn’t oblivious to racial discrimination. Every Black person he knows has shared stories of being followed and stopped for no reason by police.
But the video of Floyd’s killing, which captured him crying out “I can’t breathe” and calling out for his dead mother, made Sexton realize the powerlessness and sheer panic that Black people often experience in the presence of officers.
He said it’s crazy that it took so long for him and other white people to fully grasp that horror of police brutality, “but for us, we wouldn’t have understood were it not for the video.”
“Now,” he said, “we’re listening.”
Sexton, a salesman, recently organized a rally for police accountability in a high school parking lot near where he lives in Grapevine, Texas. It drew about 200 demonstrators, most of them white.
Members of the clergy and Grapevine Police Chief Mike Hamlin attended. One of the speakers was a Trump supporter.
A Black teen told the crowd that she was afraid to bring children into the world because she feared she wouldn’t be able to protect them from law enforcement or the country’s racism.
“That broke my heart into a thousand pieces,” Sexton said.
After weeks of protest, opinions about police violence appear to be shifting, but there’s still a large gap between white and Black people about whether it represents a national crisis.
In an AP-NORC poll taken in mid-June, fewer than half of white respondents — 39% — believe that police violence against the public is either an extreme or very serious problem, compared with 80% of Black respondents.
Those numbers did show a shrinking of the gulf between the way white and Black Americans view the issue. The same poll was taken in the early stages of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2015, and then only 19% of white people said police violence was an extreme or serious problem, compared with 73% of Black people.
“It created this opening for white people,” Battalora said of Floyd‘s killing. “But that’s different from saying we ‘get it.’ That will be more of a process.”
It remains to be seen whether the spectacle in recent days of white people locking hands to protect Black demonstrators from riot police, or taking part in the toppling of monuments to Confederate soldiers and slaveholders, represents a turning point...
The Editorial Board: If liberals won’t stop the Jacobin left, expect a political backlash and social fracture that will make Donald Trump’s Presidency look like a tea party. https://t.co/O0A91qmF9f
— WSJ Editorial Page (@WSJopinion) June 23, 2020
Anger at the killing of George Floyd has spurred useful reflection about race and perhaps some important police reform. But the political and cultural forces have transformed in recent weeks into something far less healthy—a ferocious campaign of political conformity sweeping across American artistic, educational, business and entertainment institutions.RTWT.
This coercive cultural turn threatens to devour what remains of America’s civic comity and push durable social progress on race and politics out of reach.
***
We describe this as a Jacobin moment because it has the fervor and indiscriminate judgment of the revolutionary mind. The guillotine isn’t in use, but the impulse is the same to destroy careers, livelihoods and reputations. The wave of resignations, firings, disavowals and forced apologies at institutions large and small is moving so fast it is difficult to keep track...
Social comity in a polarized society will not be achieved through coercion and struggle sessions. If liberals won’t stop the Jacobin left, expect a political backlash and social fracture that will make Donald Trump’s Presidency look like a tea party.
An early look at next week’s cover, "Say Their Names," by @KadirNelson: https://t.co/Nj3q09OrOL pic.twitter.com/a3w3l1XESb
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) June 14, 2020
Like men who saw the scroll of #MeToo testimonies & interrogated women, asking “Is it really that bad?,” the shock of Floyd’s death is itself a barometer of inequality, evidence of who has moved through life free of the burden of such terrible knowledge. https://t.co/7Ci2bv3ToO
— jelani cobb (@jelani9) June 14, 2020
No #SundayScaries here! https://t.co/Fv2BwN2hSw pic.twitter.com/HDWTHzEyS1
— Sports Illustrated Swimsuit (@SI_Swimsuit) May 31, 2020
