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Will black lives ever matter in America?
Jun 05, 2020 4 mins, 24 secs
The building it replaced is among the places addressed by the slavery abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who spoke here in 1873, three years after Minnesota passed a law extending the vote to black people, but who was nonetheless refused a hotel room because of the colour of his skin.

Despite having been to the twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul more than two dozen times times to visit my wife’s family, only this week did I visit the state house and grounds, when they become a site for people protesting the death in police hands of George Floyd.

How was it possible that black men and women were being killed by the police at such a disproportionate rate, more than half a century after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Secondly, would the protests over the death of 46-year-old Floyd, filmed by onlookers as his neck was knelt on for almost nine minutes by a white officer, be materially different to those that followed the killing of people such as Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray.

“People were furious not just about the actions of police, but by the handling of the coronavirus pandemic,” said a 27-year-old activist who asked to use the name Mark White.

Schools and colleges had been shuttered, meaning people had time on their hands.

Yet, campaigners said this was not just a case of a few bad apples, but rather an insight into a criminal justice system riven by systemic racism.

The way in which police forces were recruited, governed and regulated needed to be completely overhauled, said protesters.

Campaigners said an attendant problem has been the increased militarisation of the police, often with small forces purchasing armoured vehicles designed for the armed forces.

In Buffalo, two officers were suspended after seriously injuring a 75-year-old man at a rally against police brutality.

Work by researchers such as Samuel Singwaye and the group Campaign Zero shows there has been a reduction in police killings of black citizens in forces that had sought to adopt ideas first recommended by a commission established by Barack Obama.

Tracey Meares, a professor at Yale Law School and an expert on US police forces, said part of the problem was that there was no national standard.

“It’s true to say there have been some reductions in killings by police in urban forces,” she said.

At the same time, the data suggests an overall increase in smaller and rural police forces.

Last November, a judge in Connecticut said the families of those who lost their children at Sandy Hook have the right to sue the manufacturer of the weapon that was used.

She has also highlighted reports showing that for young black men, dying at the hands of police is among the top half-dozen causes of death.

One study found 1 in 1,000 black men and boys in America will die at the hands of police – 2.5 times the rate than that for white men.

Asked if black lives would ever matter in the US, she pointed out that to many people, black lives already matter enormously.

“If you mean, when will the government care, it depends on what day you ask me,” she said.

Not just police.

Because, for all the talk of reforming its police forces, America’s fundamental challenge of dealing with race goes much deeper?

And yet this week, a Monmouth University poll showed 76 per cent of Americans, including 71 per cent of white people, said racism and discrimination were “a big problem”.

The Black Lives Matter group was established in 2013 in response to the killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year shot dead by a neighbourhood watch volunteer.

“There is something about the economic conditions in addition to the lethal force we are seeing every day that makes this moment feel different, where people are making different kinds of demands” she said.

Rachel Swarns, an African American writer who has spoken previously of America’s “hard history”, was struck by the large number of white people who joined the protests, a trend that began following the 2014 death of Eric Garner.

“It’s hard for me to find a light in all of this, but that feels like progress – that there’s a growing national awareness across colour lines that police brutality against black people has to be addressed,” said Swarns, whose work includes American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama.

Unarmed black men being killed by police is nothing new, but now all of us are literally watching people as they’re being killed.”?

At the same time, she pointed to data suggesting there had been no reduction in the wealth disparity between black and white families in more than 70 years.

“When will black lives matter,” responded Swarns, associate professor of journalism at New York University and a contributing writer for the New York Times.

“He was speaking of a man who was brutally killed by an act of needless violence, and by a larger tide of injustice that has metastasised on this president’s watch,” Biden said.

The sculpture is the work of an African American artist, Curtis Patterson, who grew up in Louisiana, but now lives in Atlanta.

It’s not just black people, it’s people of all colours.”

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