NEWS ANALYSIS

A ‘Glorious Poetic Rage’

By Jenna Wortham
Ms. Wortham is a staff writer at The New York Times
Magazine.

June 5, 2020

In the wake of a perverse constellation of deaths of black Americans at the hands of the police and vigilantes, America’s current incarnation of a civil
rights movement — organized under the rallying cry of “Black Lives Matter” — is more powerful than ever.

“Seven years ago, we were treated like we were too radical, too out of the bounds of what is possible,” said Alicia Garza, the civil rights organizer based in
Oakland, Calif., who coined the phrase in a 2013 Facebook post after George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. “And now,
countless lives later, it’s finally seen as relevant.”

The urgency and validity of the movement have finally been recognized, she told me, as the country has reached “its boiling point.”
incontrolado
For nearly 10 days straight, Americans have been gathering and marching to protest unchecked state violence against black people. Protests
have erupted in virtually every American state, in small towns and major cities alike, and in Europe and New Zealand. Dozens of brands published social
media posts vocalizing their support for the Black Lives Matter movement or against racism. Some, including those from Ben & Jerry’s, “Sesame Street”
and Nickelodeon, felt more explicit and powerful than others. Taylor Swift responded to President Trump’s “when the looting starts, the shooting
starts” tweet by accusing him of threatening violence after years of “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism.” The “Star Wars” actor John
Boyega gave an emotional speech at a protest in London.

This is the biggest collective demonstration of civil unrest around state violence in our generation’s memory. The unifying theme, for the first time in
America’s history, is at last: Black Lives Matter.

Latest Updates: George Floyd Protests Updated 18m ago

Minneapolis to ban the use of chokeholds in response to George Floyd’s death.

Protests continue in cities nationwide ahead of demonstrations planned for Saturday.

More police violence occurs during protests over police violence.

See more updates

Why now?

Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil rights organization Color of Change, speculated that it was the stark cruelty of the video of George Floyd’s
death that captivated the country. The pain was palpable, the nonchalance in Derek Chauvin’s face, chilling. “The police officer is looking into the camera
as he’s pushing the life out of him,” Mr. Robinson said.

In Minnesota, black people are four times as likely to be killed by law enforcement as white people. Mr. Floyd’s death shares a grim geographical lineage
with other black deaths that rocked the nation: The place where he died is roughly a 15-minute drive from Falcon Heights, a suburb of St. Paul, Minn.,
where Philando Castile was shot by a police officer in 2016 while his fiancée streamed the encounter live on Facebook. The year before that, Jamar Clark
was shot by the police as they tried to handcuff him as he lay on the ground, in the same vicinity as where Mr. Floyd gasped for his final breaths beneath a
white police officer’s knee.
 A Black Lives Matter protest on Thursday at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington. Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock

“The reason this got so big is because it has been happening,” Junauda Petrus-Nasah, an author and organizer from Minneapolis, where Mr. Floyd lived
and was killed, told me. On the third day of protests, when a police station house was lit on fire, “it felt like a glorious poetic rage,” she said.

The pandemic added its own accelerant to the mix. For roughly three months before Mr. Floyd’s death, Americans were living in a state of hypervigilance
and anxiety, coping with feelings of uncertainty, fear and vulnerability — things many black Americans experience on a regular basis. Information about
how to avoid the virus was distressingly sparse and confusing as local and federal officials sparred about the severity of the pandemic and how best to
contain it.

Meanwhile, a clearer — and bleaker — picture of the country began to emerge. The spoils of privilege among some was in stark contrast to the lack of it
among others. While some Americans fled cities to second homes, millions of others filed for unemployment and formed lines at food banks. Empathy
for the plight of essential workers, a category in which black people are overrepresented, swelled tremendously. Data revealed that black and Latinx
communities were being disproportionately ravaged by the pandemic.

At the same time, social distancing meant much of daily life — school, work, meetings, parties, weddings, birthday celebrations — was migrating to
screens. It seems we’d just created newfound trust and intimacy with our phones and computers when the gruesome parade of deaths began a procession
across them. Ahmaud Arbery was chased down and killed in Glynn County, Ga., on Feb. 23. Breonna Taylor was in bed when the police entered her
apartment and sprayed her with bullets in Louisville, Ky., on March 13. Nina Pop was found stabbed to death in Sikeston, Mo., on May 3. Tony McDade
was gunned down by the police in Tallahassee, Fla., on May 27.

By the time outrage and despair over Mr. Floyd’s death filled our feeds, the tinderbox was ready to explode.

If the country had been open per usual, some organizers told me, the distractions of pre-pandemic life might have kept people from tuning into the
dialogues online. Several said this is the most diverse demonstration of support for Black Lives Matters that they can recall in the movement’s seven-year
history. On May 28, Twitter told me, more than eight million tweets tagged with #BlackLivesMatter were posted on the platform. By comparison, on Dec.
4, 2014, nearly five months after Eric Garner died at the hands of a police officer on Staten Island, the number of tweets tagged with #BlackLivesMatter
peaked at 146,000.

Finally, there’s the sheer volume of video documentation of the police atrocities at the protests themselves, which has only served to reaffirm critiques of
unbridled uses of force and underscore the cognitive dissonances.

Our social feeds have become like security camera grids, each with images of a dystopia: in a park in the nation’s capital, peaceful protesters dispersed
with chemical irritants and smoke canisters, clearing a path for the president, who then posed for a photograph nearby. In Philadelphia, police
officers pelting demonstrators trapped on the side of a highway with canisters of tear gas. In New York, two police vehicles accelerating into a crowd. In
Atlanta, police officers breaking into a car and tasering two black college students. Every day, people with cameras have offered a raw and terrifying
supplement to television and newspaper coverage.

Thenjiwe McHarris, a strategist for the Movement for Black Lives, said this kind of documentation and distribution is unveiling the sadism that black
Americans regularly face. “We used to do cop watch patrols, and we would go around in teams and document it and show the country what was
happening to our people,” she told me. “Obviously, by now, we know that cameras don’t deter the police, but what they do show is extremely important
for the rest of America to see.”
The movement drew an additional boost from the digital interactions of racially diverse communities. Melissa Brown, a postdoctoral fellow at the
Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, observed that as black Twitter users have become increasingly interested in Korean pop
music, there has been more of an exchange between black and Korean communities online. This month, after the Dallas Police Department used a tweet
to encourage people to report “illegal activity” to its application, K-pop fans flooded the app with videos of their favorite singers (known as fancams).
Though the department wouldn’t confirm why, the service was temporarily taken offline.

Last, while much of the nation’s attention drifted away from Black Lives Matter, organizers and activists weren’t dormant. Ms. Garza told me that the
movement’s first generation of organizers has been working steadily to become savvier and even more strategic over the past seven years, and have been
joined by motivated younger leaders.

Ms. Garza said she hopes the current momentum carries the movement forward without tempering it. “We can go one of two ways,” she said. “The ‘law
and order’ route or the route where we make black lives matter because we all want them to matter. And have access to the things we deserve, and peace
and justice in our communities.”
Jenna Wortham (@jennydeluxe) is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and a co-host of the “Still Processing” podcast.

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