Seven lives lost and a new reckoning on race

IT LOOKED, AT FIRST, LIKE A PLACE WE HAD BEEN BEFORE. On the pavement outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge, La., two white police officers wrestle a large black man to the ground. Shots ring out, the cell-phone video jumps, another fraught summer begins. It was just after midnight on Tuesday, July 5. The footage went up that afternoon; protests began the same day. What followed, however, was the furthest thing from familiar. The events of the next 48 hours took the country to a place so new and uncertain that, after more than a week of talking about almost nothing else, it’s still not clear where we are.

But we do know the precise point of departure. The day after the shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, at about 9 p.m. at the curb of the eastbound lane of Larpenteur Avenue in Falcon Heights, Minn., a woman pressed an icon on her phone and began broadcasting live from the passenger seat of a white Oldsmobile. She panned to the driver’s seat, where Philando Castile was slumped and bleeding, and spoke with a controlled urgency and a careful courtesy that communicates,