To Avoid Integration, Americans Built Barricades in Urban Space
George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer at the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue. The location is significant. It lies in a part of the city wedged between two freeways and not far from an unofficial boundary separating neighborhoods with large populations of black and Latino residents from the mostly white neighborhoods to the south. For decades, this boundary was legally enforced through covenants limiting who could live where.
America’s brand of urban inequality relies on such barricades to ensure that all kinds of problems—of which aggressive policing is just one—are concentrated in particular places. Floyd’s death has created a national uproar over police violence against black Americans, but changing police tactics is not enough. The barricades have to come down, too.
The interaction that Floyd, who was black, had with four the rate at which they use it against white people. Inequality occurs in other dimensions: Black residents of Minnesota make up 7 percent of the state’s population, but of the state’s confirmed COVID-19 cases. Floyd’s autopsy revealed that he had been infected with the virus before his death.
