A GLOBAL RECKONING
CAN EIGHT MINUTES AND 46 seconds change the world? From London to Lisbon, Berlin to Brisbane, Pretoria to Paris, as well as Toronto, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and scores of other cities in dozens of other countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, the answer, increasingly, seems to be yes.
In the month that’s passed since George Floyd was killed and that horrifying, heartbreaking nearly nine-minute video revealed his treatment by four Minneapolis police officers, protests have spread beyond the U.S. and around the globe. The themes are at once universal—demonstrators demand justice for Floyd, and call for police reform and an end to systemic racism—and unique to the particular challenges of racial justice in each country. Protestors invoke the names of Black people killed in their country along with Floyd’s, topple symbols of racism specific to their culture, and point to what they believe are egregious examples of inequality particular to where they live.
The overarching message that ties the global protests together: “Black Lives Matter.”
“This is a watershed moment,” said Patrisse Cullors, who co-founded the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 in response to the acquittal of the man who killed Black teenager Trayvon Martin as he was walking home from a convenience store. People are saying, said Cullors: “Enough is enough.”
Why now? In part, it’s the singular brutality of what happened to Floyd, coming on the heels of a recent series of racially-charged encounters sparking outrage (the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, the birdwatching-while-Black incident in New York City’s Central Park). Add in the coronavirus pandemic hitting the health and economic well-being of the Black community particularly hard, and the combination is proving to be a tipping point. The result, said Hawk Newsome, a prominent New York civil rights activist who started Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, an unofficial chapter of BLM, is nothing less than a seismic shift in global awareness around the realities of racism.
“I’ve heard from people in Thailand who are having rallies with Black Lives Matter of Greater New York t-shirts; I’ve had
