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ENOUGH: COVID-19, Structural Racism, Police Brutality, Plutocracy, Climate Change - and Time for Health Justice, Democratic Governance, and an Equitable, Sustainable Future [ajph.aphapublications.org]

 

By Krieger, American Journal of Public Health, October 7, 2020

COVID-19 starkly reveals how structural injustice cuts short the lives of people subjected to systemic racism and economic deprivation. It is not, however, the only crisis at hand.

Since the May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man, by the Minneapolis, Minnesota, police, protests have coursed through cities and towns across the United States, denouncing structural racism and police violence, fueled, too, by COVID-19’s disproportionate toll on US populations of color. In a context in which US police kill upwards of 1000 people per year—nearly three per day, disproportionately Black Americans, and vastly more than in any other wealthy country—the last straw was Floyd’s horrific murder. Floyd died because he could not breathe, because police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for an agonizing 8 minutes and 46 seconds—in open view, as videoed for all to see, while three other police standing nearby failed to intervene.

The current upsurge of protest builds on the leadership of so many groups, perhaps most prominently Black Lives Matter, founded in 2013 by three radical Black women organizers—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi—in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s vigilante murderer, George Zimmerman, and which rapidly grew in the wake of Michael Brown’s killing by Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in 2014. Also feeding these protests is the post-2016 rise in hate crimes, coupled with overt expressions of racism, both by word and by policies, at the highest levels of the US government.

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