America was jolted out of its pandemic stupor this week by a dramatic cycle of police violence, protests, looting and retaliation—one that quickly jumped from city to city and crashed, literally, against the gates of the White House.
In some ways, this wave seems familiar: It echoes what happened in Ferguson, in Baltimore, in Los Angeles and in every other city that has exploded in anger after a killing by police. The sweep of the current protests—in hundreds of cities across all 50 states, lasting more than a week so far—and the sense that a moment of national change might have arrived have drawn comparisons to other waves of social unrest dating at least to 1968.
Despite the echoes, it’s also hard not to feel like we’re living through something disorienting and new. The protests and response have taken on complicated dimensions: the unprecedented backdrop of a global pandemic that has left people scared, pent-up and unemployed; the reported involvement of far left and far-right groups, or people posing as such to sow confusion; plus, the chaotic, confrontational politics of the Trump era and its blur of real and fake claims. Oh, and it’s a presidential election year.
To offer some context for what we’re living through, and why it feels especially unsettling right now, Politico Magazine asked a range of thinkers to tell us: What’s really different this time around?
Some pointed, naturally, to the pandemic—the anxiety of enforced isolation; the way it has disproportionately affected people of color; the ubiquity of masks that blur identities and make it harder to parse the motives of different demonstrators, or looters. Some respondents detected a more widespread embrace of violence across the political spectrum—including by the president, police and rioters—while others saw cause for hope, pointing out that police forces actually have embraced reforms in recent years, if not enough to prevent deaths like George Floyd’s. Still others disagreed entirely with the notion that this time is different: At the core of the protests, they said, is an enduring struggle with racism that America has never been able to resolve, and that promises to keep coming back in new ways and with new energy.
Here are their full, varied responses.
BY TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM
Tressie McMillan Cottom is associate professor and senior research fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and author, most recently, of Thick: And Other Essays.
Only time will tell whether this moment is really different, or whether black Americans have merely thirsted for so long that we are drinking sand. The United States has the remarkable ability to reconstitute old oppressions from the ashes of social movements.