The New Yorker Issue: 22/06/2020

JUNE 22, 2020 4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 15 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Jelani Cobb on what protests mean for America; George Floyd’s lawyer; public hearings, on Zoom; Brooklyn postcard; marching as a black immigrant. PERSONAL HISTORY Elizabeth Alexander 20 The Trayvon Generation On childhood in the face of police brutality. SHOUTS & MURMURS Riane Konc 23 Presidential Trolley Problems AMERICAN CHRONICLES Jill Lepore 24 The Riot Report A long history of government inaction. LETTER FROM MINNEAPOLIS Luke Mogelson 30 The Uprising How one city became the center of a movement. PORTFOLIO Isaac Scott 42 Whose Streets with David Remnick Protesters join together in Philadelphia. A REPORTER AT LARGE Rachel Aviv 56 Punishment by Pandemic The chaos of the coronavirus in prison. FICTION Scholastique Mukasonga 66 “Grief ” SKETCHBOOK Barry Blitt 71 “Home Hair Styling for Men” Sarah Resnick THE CRITICS Adam Gopnik BOOKS 74 Brit Bennett’s “The Vanishing Half.” 77 A new history of Mengele’s evil. 81 Briefly Noted A CRITIC AT LARGE Paul Elie 82 Reckoning with Flannery O’Connor’s racism. DANCING Jennifer Homans 86 Choreography in a socially distant world. THE CURRENT CINEMA Anthony Lane 88 “Da 5 Bloods,” “The King of Staten Island.” POEMS Marilyn Nelson 60 “Pigeon and Hawk” Terrance Hayes 68 “George Floyd” Kadir Nelson COVER “Say Their Names” DRAWINGS Emily Flake, Roz Chast, Brooke Bourgeois, Colin Tom, Frank Cotham, Suerynn Lee, David Sipress, David Borchart, Edward Steed, Jeremy Nguyen, Lonnie Millsap, Ellis Rosen, Maggie Larson SPOTS Iván Bravo

PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT. CONTRIBUTORS The New Yorker Elizabeth Alexander (“TheTrayvon Gen- Isaac Scott (Portfolio, p. 42) is a pho- Crossword: eration,” p. 20) is a poet and the author tographer and a ceramicist based in Introducing of,most recently,the memoir “The Light Philadelphia. of the World.” She is the president of Partner Mode the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Jill Lepore (“The Riot Report,” p. 24), a professor of history at Harvard, will You can now solve Kadir Nelson (Cover),an artist,won the publish her latest book, “If Then,” in our online crossword 2020 Caldecott Medal for his illustra- September. puzzles with a friend tions for Kwame Alexander’s book- who’s across the room length poem, “The Undefeated.” Luke Mogelson (“The Uprising,” p. 30) has been contributing to The New Yorker or halfway around Rachel Aviv (“Punishment by Pandemic,” since 2013. He is the author of the story the world. p. 56), a staff writer, was a 2019 national collection “These Heroic,Happy Dead.” fellow at New America. Start playing at Marilyn Nelson (Poem, p. 60) has writ- newyorker.com/crossword Ronald Wimberly (Sketchpad, p. 19) is ten books of poetry for adults, young the creator of the graphic novel “Prince adults, and children. “Lubaya’s Quiet of Cats” and the magazine LAAB. Roar” is forthcoming this fall. Scholastique Mukasonga (Fiction, p. 66), Paul Elie (A Critic at Large, p. 82), the a Rwandan writer who lives in France, author of “The Life You Save May Be will publish her fourth book in En- Your Own,”is a senior fellow at George- glish, the story collection “Igifu,” in town University’s Berkley Center for September. Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. Terrance Hayes (Poem, p. 68) is the au- Jennifer Homans (Dancing, p. 86), the thor of “American Sonnets for My Past magazine’s dance critic,directs the Cen- and Future Assassin” and “To Float in ter for Ballet and the Arts, at N.Y.U. the Space Between.” She is the author of “Apollo’s Angels.” THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM VIDEO DEPT. U.S. JOURNAL LEFT: CHRISTOPHER HWISU KIM AND JOSHUA THOMAS; RIGHT: KEITH NEGLEY A cousin of Eric Garner on what Can COVID-19 contact-tracing plans George Floyd’s family can expect in tackle the problems of reopening? the fight against police brutality. Benjamin Wallace-Wells reports. Download the New Yorker Today app for the latest news, commentary, criticism, and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008. 2 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

THE MAIL Created by the editors of LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA Kennedy’s observation that “knowledge ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST, PHOTO BY PAUL RAESIDE of the oceans is more than a matter of Ben Taub’s account of Victor Vescovo’s curiosity. Our very survival may hinge AD PRO is the members-only resource extraordinary mission to reach the five upon it”? If only another President for design industry professionals deeps of the world’s oceans left me would set as ambitious a deadline for in awe (“Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” ocean exploration as J.F.K. did for a MEMBERSHIP INCLUDES May 18th). I became concerned, how- moon landing. ever, about the implications that it may .Exclusive, must-read industry have for the future of private explora- 1Ben Hellwarth and market news tion. As one member of Vescovo’s mot- ley crew puts it, the group’s accom- Santa Monica, Calif. .Trend reports and the best plishment is akin to a “daily flight to new product sources the moon.” But a key difference is that HELPING HANDS the quest to put a man on the moon .Effective tools and events was not only a collective enterprise in We should all praise the organizations to grow your business spirit; it was also overseen by a national that Jia Tolentino mentions in her piece government. Though Vescovo’s will- about mutual aid (“Can I Help You?” .Searchable AD archive spanning ingness to collaborate with scientists May 18th). However, readers should be 100 years of magazine issues is admirable, he admits that someone careful not to look at these groups .More essential resources with a private submarine like his could through rose-colored glasses, or to con- that only AD has access to become a “Bond villain,” capable of struct false dichotomies between mu- disrupting markets for profit or of sal- tual aid and charitable organizations. Join now and save 20% off vaging lost nuclear weaponry. In an age Not all charities are inflexible behe- your annual membership in which billionaires such as Elon Musk moths: around sixty per cent of the are becoming increasingly involved in nearly one million charitable 501(c)3 ARCHDIGEST.COM / JOINNOW science and exploration, one wonders organizations in the U.S. have an an- whether it is wise to celebrate these nual income of less than a hundred types of conquests by the ultra-wealthy. thousand dollars. As Tolentino notes, Andrew Wofford many mutual-aid organizations end up Bryn Mawr, Penn. registering as nonprofit charities in order to provide legal protection to Taub’s fine story about Victor Vescovo workers and volunteers, and to accept reminds us that we still have much to tax-deductible donations. It seems that learn about the world’s oceans—and Tolentino is writing just as much about that it is single-minded (and often in- mutual aid as she is about the “para- dependently financed) entrepreneurs dox of scale”—the idea that large or- who lead the way down. As I describe ganizations have more capacity to help in my book “Sealab,” the U.S. Navy’s but are more bureaucratic, whereas program of that name, developed in the smaller organizations work more closely nineteen-sixties, was spearheaded by with communities but are relatively an iconoclastic medical officer, Captain limited in their reach. Even so, mutual- George Bond,who cajoled skeptics into aid organizations, nonprofits, and char- pursuing his space-age dream of equip- ities are all part of the vital non-govern- ping “aquanauts”to operate from under- mental sector of citizens’ initiatives. sea versions of space stations. Sealab John P. Casey yielded scientific breakthroughs that Center for Nonprofit Strategy and would eventually enable divers to go a Management thousand feet or deeper—a depth that, Baruch College, CUNY these days, commercial divers gener- New York City ally reach only when they’re working in offshore oil fields. Might it finally • be time for a true “wet NASA?” Or should we continue to rely on enthu- Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, siasts like Vescovo to address John F. address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, New York City museums, galleries, theatres, music venues, and cinemas have closed. Here’s a selection of culture to be found online and streaming. JUNE 17 – 23, 2020 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN In 1990, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, one of America’s most important and emotionally eloquent contemporary artists—who died of AIDS-related causes, in 1996, at the age of thirty-eight—made a simple but radical piece: a pile of fortune cookies, free for the taking, which was replenished when it was depleted.This medita- tion on the sweetness of life and the inevitability of loss is being re-created by some thousand people world- wide through July 5; images are online at the Web sites of the Andrea Rosen and David Zwirner galleries. PHOTOGRAPH BY DOAN LY

1 bush Zombies has always had a raw center, in core repertoire, but this week the Met shares and it’s that pained, pulsing core that drives high-definition video from two recent, revela- MUSIC the group’s urgent new six-track E.P., “now, tory stagings of operas by Philip Glass, both more than ever.” Meechy Darko, Zombie Juice, directed by Phelim McDermott and unavail- Ambrose Akinmusire: and Erick Arc Elliott dropped the project, able from the Met’s on-demand subscription along with a merchandise line, in early June, service. “Akhnaten,” recorded this past season “on the tender spot” announcing that they would split every dollar and streaming on June 19, stars the arresting of the proceeds among three organizations countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo as the JAZZ The trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire in- dedicated to black communities. From the heretic pharaoh of the title. “Satyagraha,” an sures that the joys and the anxieties of current smoke-filled vibe of “herb” to the Sophie ecstatic imagining of Gandhi’s early years in African-American life stay at the forefront of Faith-assisted closer, “when i’m gone,” which South Africa, plays the following day, featuring his aesthetic through written statements and features some of Elliott’s sleekest production, Richard Croft in the production’s 2011 revival. spoken-word collaborations. But he doesn’t the rappers weave around one another to illu- The streams are available for twenty-three always need words. On his new album, “on the minate experiences of black trauma and police hours; donations are encouraged.—Steve Smith tender spot of every calloused moment,” the brutality. On “quicksand,” Darko spits gruffly, (June 17-23 at 7:30.) short, reflective track “reset (quiet victories “I know they say drugs kill, but so do cops, & celebrated defeats)” speaks Akinmusire’s who cares?”—J.L. Opera Saratoga: “Connect! Daily” heart and mind in the anguished intensity of his horn, recalling the great Booker Little, one “Love Saves the Day” OPERA Forced to cancel its summer festival of Akinmusire’s stated influences. Some of the owing to COVID-19, Opera Saratoga has moved pieces with his storming quartet exhibit virtu- DISCO Published in 2005, the British histo- online with “Connect! Daily,” a series based osic dazzle, but the less frenetic performances rian Tim Lawrence’s “Love Saves the Day: A around the works that would have been part of reveal his gift for dramatic understatement: History of American Dance Music Culture, its season. For the next two and a half months, the final track, “Hooded procession (read 1970-1979” remains the definitive accounting the upstate company will post a short, lightly the names out loud),” is a meditation, spare of New York’s underground disco scene in the edited video of a performance to its Facebook and searching, scored for his lone electric seventies. Now Lawrence has compiled a two- page and Web site every day at 9 A.M. For the piano.—Steve Futterman disk soundtrack that captures the utopic air month of June, the cast members of a would-be of the parties depicted in the book, defined production of “The Pirates of Penzance” plun- Built to Spill: by loose-limbed grooves played by live, often der Gilbert and Sullivan’s œuvre for semi-op- eccentric bands. The collection evokes the era eratic treasures; July belongs to Beethoven, “The Songs of Daniel Johnston” acutely, with James Brown and the Jackson 5 and August to Sondheim. Three additional setting the stage for choice cult picks, includ- series, which are available free of charge, are ROCK For all the tales of wildness that made ing Chuck Mangione’s florid and theatrical dedicated to trivia quizzes, professional men- Daniel Johnston the king of outsider artists in “Land of Make Believe” and the dubbed-out the nineties, the music he created was graced jazz fusion of Miroslav Vitous’s “New York 1torship, and panel discussions on topics such with at least one trait of successful pop—he City.”—Michaelangelo Matos played bighearted songs that felt as though as race in opera.—Oussama Zahr they had been beamed to stereos from more “Nightly Met Opera Streams” exotic environs. On “Built to Spill Plays the PODCASTS Songs of Daniel Johnston,” the late artist’s OPERA The Metropolitan Opera has announced coevals, inspired by their brief tenure backing that its next season won’t begin before Dec. 31, Radical Imagination him during a 2017 tour, revisit his songbook. so audiences will have to continue sating their Built to Spill’s straightforward interpretations operatic appetite with the company’s free It’s become increasingly clear that planning confront Johnston’s work on its own terms, nightly streams for the foreseeable future. The for the future will require imagination: un- revelling in his comely melodies and emotional schedule leans heavily on superstar performers precedented times call for unprecedented directness. Though the trio eschews the knotty guitar patterns for which it is celebrated, it DANCE POP On her new album,“Chromatica,”Lady deftly exploits what might prove to be the Gaga aims to vanquish the personal de- ILLUSTRATION BY CINDY ECHEVARRIA band’s greater asset: the ability to project a mons and the hunger for notoriety that sense of wonder with every note. The album’s she embraced, with much success, on her awe fits its muse.—Jay Ruttenberg dance-pop début, “The Fame,” and its dark addendum, “The Fame Monster.” Coriky: “Coriky” Described by Billboard as a “legacy artist” following her Super Bowl halftime show, INDIE ROCK On Coriky’s self-titled début, you in 2017—less than a decade into her can occasionally hear the past lives of the band’s recording career—Gaga pivoted away three members, Ian MacKaye, Amy Farina, from genre-pushing experiments with and Joe Lally. The record preserves some of “Shallow,”the mutant earworm hit from the vocal interplay of the Evens, a duo that the 2018 movie “A Star Is Born.”With MacKaye and Farina formed in 2001, as well “Chromatica,”she returns triumphantly as the visceral spirit of MacKaye and Lally’s to what she calls the “dance floor I fought legendary post-hardcore group, Fugazi. But for,”piling on the hooks in sturdily built, Coriky’s sound is more of a slow boil—one that if nostalgic, house and electro-pop an- captures the perniciousness of American apathy thems. Outfitted in hot-pink super- and the banality of empty outrage. The album shero costumes and unleashing her voice interrogates complacency with an absurdist, in thunderbolts, she claims a self-love almost Dadaist approach: a woman casually that feels hard won.—Oussama Zahr washes a dish after carrying out a drone strike; the prescription for endless violence is a cup of tea. On “Inauguration Day,” MacKaye lets out an agitated yowl, his voice hoarse from trying to wake people from their stupor.—Julyssa Lopez Flatbush Zombies: “now, more than ever” HIP-HOP Even at its most lysergic and unteth- ered, the music of the Brooklyn rap trio Flat- THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 5

PODCAST DEPT. with interviews and materials that illuminate the choreography. One of Cunningham’s most epic works, “Biped,” from 1999, is available starting on June 15, in a performance by the French ensemble CNDC-Angers. Cunningham used large computer projections of figures in motion and shimmering costumes by Suzanne Gallo to augment the measured, almost medi- tative movements of the dancers onstage. The more playful piece “How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run” (1965), performed to one-minute vignettes composed by John Cage, can be seen in a performance from the American Dance Festival through July 5.—Marina Harss (vimeo. com/showcase/centennial-repertory-festival) “Snap Judgment,” which describes itself as “storytelling with a beat,” DTH on Demand: “Return” débuted in 2010, after its host and executive producer, Glynn Washington, a musician, law-school graduate, and educator, won a talent contest run by Dance Theatre of Harlem’s online program- PRX and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Washington wanted ming continues, on June 20, with the digi- to create a new sound for public radio, and his show is distinguished by its tal première of “Return.” The work, created, urgent mood, cinematic music and sound design, and impassioned nar- in 1999, by Robert Garland, the company’s ration. A new episode, “Thick Blue Line,” centers on three stories about undervalued resident choreographer, is a overaggressive policing—one told by Tariq (Black Thought) Trotter, of the crowd-pleasing, code-switching manifesto. The Roots—and begins with Washington describing a recent protest in Oakland. music is a playlist of James Brown and Aretha “I want to weep,”Washington says.We hear cars honking, protestors yelling. Franklin hits. The steps are classical and ver- “Hundreds, thousands of cars, bicycles, motorcycles . . . screaming back nacular, drawn from the ballet classroom and light at our national darkness as far as the eye can see. . . . I want my kids from the club. The message is “We can do it to feel this. I need them to have hope—even as I’ve lost my own.”Then he all.”—Brian Seibert (dancetheatreofharlem.org/ sets people chanting “Black lives matter”to a mighty beat.—Sarah Larson dthondemand) solutions. In “Radical Imagination,” Angela new season, which began last week, it returns Jacob’s Pillow ILLUSTRATION BY JASJYOT SINGH HANS Glover Blackwell, the founder of the equity-fo- to its origins with a series about the political cussed think tank PolicyLink, presents stories rise of David Duke, who, in the late eighties For the first time in its eighty-eight-year and conversations about big ideas, including and early nineties, served as a representative in history, America’s foremost summer dance reparations, housing as a human right, universal the Louisiana State House, won the Republican festival isn’t bringing dance to the Berkshires. basic income, and—last October—police aboli- nomination for the Louisiana governor’s race, The festival does continue virtually, though, tion. In an April episode, Blackwell describes and mounted campaigns for the U.S. Senate through its extensive digital archive. And, on the COVID era as “the kind of experience we and the Presidency—after having been a Grand June 20, which would have been the date of this expect to find only in science fiction and dys- Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan. The host, Josh year’s opening gala, it streams a free event on topian novels,” talks about “envisioning our Levin, who grew up in Louisiana during the its Web site. Borrowing the title of a series of way out of this pandemic,” and examines the Duke era, illuminates, through archival record- lectures once given by Ted Shawn, the Pillow’s literary genre of visionary fiction, which not ings and investigative reporting, how Duke evangelizing founder, “Dance We Must” boasts only imagines a better society but is fostering got traction—via dirty tricks, telegenic looks, Wendy Whelan and Kyle Abraham as hosts. a movement to make its ideas a reality. It’s a Along with greetings from surprise guests, surprisingly encouraging show, enhanced by 1carefully reframed messaging, and positioning there will be performances, made for the oc- illustrative news clips, music, and Blackwell’s casion and prerecorded, including a new piece warm, grounded presence, which makes for a himself as “the ultimate outsider.”—S.L. by Abraham and another by the tap wizard trustworthy atmosphere in which to consider Michelle Dorrance.—B.S. (jacobspillow.org) bold ideas.—Sarah Larson DANCE “Love from BAM” So far, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s the- atres-are-dark digital programming has re- flected the institution’s wealth of dance history only scantily. That starts to change on June 18, with the release of “Watermill,” Luca Vegget- ti’s 2018 reimagining of an experimental 1972 memory ballet by Jerome Robbins. Inspired by Noh drama and the trendsetting theatre of Robert Wilson, the original provoked strong reactions, both against and in favor of its med- itative slowness. This intimate revival, starring the former New York City Ballet principal dancer Joaquín de Luz, offered a chance to reconsider the work—and now does again, online.—B.S. (bam.org/watermill2018) Slow Burn Centennial Repertory Festival WPA Virtual Commissions In the first two seasons of the beloved series Last year, for Merce Cunningham’s centenary, With the uncertainty surrounding when danc- “Slow Burn,” from Slate, its co-creator Leon dance companies around the world performed ers will be able to gather in studios, some in- Neyfakh explored what it was like to live works from his vast repertory. Fortunately, stitutions, including the Guggenheim, with its through a widely known but little-understood many of those performances were recorded and “Works & Process” series, are commissioning political period—first Watergate, then the Clin- can now be streamed online. Every Monday, a dance videos. One such video already seems ton impeachment. After Neyfakh left (to start new piece is added to the rotating library of the destined for a long afterlife: Jamar Roberts’s “Fiasco,” on Luminary), “Slow Burn” shifted Centennial Repertory Festival (on its Vimeo claustrophobic, tightly framed “Cooped,” a focus, examining the Biggie-Tupac saga. In its page), curated by the Cunningham Trust, along study of solitude and the black male body. On 6 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020



June 21, the series will release a new work by Chicago Imagists,” by Pentimenti Productions, makes this online resource an essential go-to for the Swedish dancemaker Pontus Lidberg, who, which chronicles an unruly, surrealist strain both casual and advanced students of the fervid in 2010, made a handsome, coolly lit dance of Pop art and its most prominent collective. scene.—Johanna Fateman (chicagoimagists.com) film called “Labyrinth Within.” A piece by the The Hairy Who was a group of six painters— performer John Jarboe, a creator of cabaret- Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Edward Hopper inspired plays for his company the Bearded Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum—who Ladies, comes on June 22, followed, the next attended the School of the Art Institute of I haven’t seen this large show at the Beyeler day, by a work from the Canadian drag artist Chicago and began exhibiting together in the Foundation, Switzerland’s premier museum of Victoria Sin.—M.H. (guggenheim.org/event/ mid-nineteen-sixties, but adhered to no uniform modern art. I take its fine catalogue, “Edward vision. From Nutt’s goofy and unsettling figu- Hopper: A Fresh Look at Landscape,” edited by 1event_series/works-process) ration to Green’s psychedelic satires of adver- the exhibition’s curator, Ulf Küster, as occasion tising illustration and Nilsson’s otherworldly enough for reflecting anew on the artist’s stub- ART watercolor landscapes, they metabolized an born force. (A selection of Hopper’s paintings array of influences—folk art, comics, and film is also on view on the museum’s Web site.) The Chicago Imagists noir among them—in ribald, fantastic, some- The visual bard of American solitude—not times politically pointed works, which the site’s loneliness, a maudlin projection—speaks to This brightly encyclopedic and consummately creators break down in a comprehensive A-to-Z our isolated states these days with fortuitous navigable Web site is an enduring companion index. Deftly compiled research into the Chi- poignance. But Hopper is always doing that, to the 2014 documentary “Hairy Who & the cago Imagists’ major and minor figures (as well pandemic or no pandemic. Aloneness is his as pertinent concepts and elucidating context) great theme, symbolizing America: insecure ART ONLINE selfhoods in a country that is only abstractly a nation. (“E pluribus unum,” a magnificent ideal, thuds on “unum” every day throughout the land.) The emotional tug of all of Hopper’s characters requires their unawareness of being looked at. To see them is to take on a peculiar responsibility. Can you pledge patriotic alle- giance to a void? Hopper shows how, exploring a condition in which, by being separate, we belong together. You don’t have to like the idea, but, once you’ve truly experienced this painter’s art, it is as impossible to ignore as a stone in your shoe.—Peter Schjeldahl (fondationbeyeler.ch) Following the unconscionable killing of George Floyd, the nation’s mu- Elizabeth Peyton © KERRY JAMES MARSHALL / COURTESY THE ARTIST AND JACK SHAINMAN seums flocked to social media to condemn racism—messages that often came off more as marketing ploys than as commitments to change. One This American painter is best known for her GALLERY / WALKER ART CENTER / T. B. WALKER ACQUISITION FUND inspiring exception is the Walker Art Center, a contemporary-art mecca unapologetically sentimental portraits of in Minnesota, which announced on Instagram that it would cut ties with friends and famous figures, from Kurt Co- the Minneapolis Police Department until certain demonstrable reforms bain to Napoleon. The Web address of Pey- take place: “Demilitarizing training programs, holding officers account- ton’s digital project “Eternal Return” (hosted able for the use of excessive force, and treating communities of color with by the Gladstone gallery) shares its name, dignity and respect.”The action was small—the Walker had contracted Petitcrieu, with that of a magical dog in the off-duty officers for security a few times a year—but meaningful, espe- medieval legend of Tristan and Iseult, a tipoff cially for this influential institution, which, in the past, has occasionally to her eclectic interests. The site is closer seemed to value the international art world at the expense of its own to a touch-activated film than to a conven- back yard. (Kudos to the Walker’s thoughtful new director, Mary Ceruti, tional online exhibition. Downward scrolling for guiding the change.) The museum’s Web site, walkerart.org, has also yields unexpected movement onscreen: im- responded to the groundswell of protest with swift sensitivity, publishing ages are cannily layered, edged to the side, fresh commissions—a meditation on Floyd and black utopianism by the or zoomed in and out. Photographs (whose young Minneapolis poet and educator Keno Evol—and deep cuts from subjects include ancient Egyptian artifacts, its archive, including video of an illuminating conversation, from 2005, fiery sunsets, and Greta Thunberg) outnum- between the poet Elizabeth Alexander and the painter Kerry James Mar- ber reproductions of Peyton’s own colorful, shall, whose 2003 canvas “Gulf Stream”is pictured above.—Andrea K. Scott delicate works. The grand unifying theme is recurrence, both visual and historical, but an artful browser-cache aesthetic also anchors the project in the everyday. The intimacy of smartphone viewing lends itself particularly well to Peyton’s essayistic piece, which is ren- 1dered with her signature light touch and se- ductive Pop romanticism.—J.F. (petitcrieu.com) MOVIES Roll Red Roll Nancy Schwartzman’s 2018 documentary is sober and unexcitable, as it must be, in its presentation of the facts. The story that she recounts, dating from 2012, is centered on the sexual assault of a sixteen-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio. Two members of the high-school football team were convicted of rape. Teen-age drinking, unsurprisingly, was part of the equation, but what made the case especially disturbing, and very 8 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020



WHAT TO STREAM side City Hall, mainly by black women, against both cuts in welfare benefits and the so-called urban renewal around Lincoln Center—which was driving many poor and black people out of the neighborhood—ends with horrific police violence. The filmmakers speak at length with Jeannette Washington, one of the protest’s organizers, who sought to create a large-scale movement. The neighborhood’s politics and festivities converge in a weeklong block party sponsored by the Peace and Freedom Party; Blackwood’s agile, alert cinematography offers a moving vision of civic vitality amid the city’s tensions.—R.B. (Streaming on Vimeo.) “The Killing Floor,” the first feature directed by Bill Duke, from 1984, is a Take This Hammer revelatory historical drama that offers a powerful template for social analysis in fiction.(It’s streaming on Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema,in a new restoration.) When James Baldwin visited San Francisco The film follows Frank Custer (Damien Leake), a young black man who, in the spring of 1963, he took part in a doc- in 1917, moves from his small home town to Chicago.There, he finds work umentary, directed by Richard O. Moore, in a slaughterhouse, joins its union, and organizes other black workers. But, that would reveal the racial injustices behind the following year, when the First World War ends and returning veterans the city’s freethinking façade and dispel the reclaim their jobs, management undermines the integrated union by stoking illusion that American racism was confined dissension between black laborers and white ones; that conflict leads, in 1919, to the Jim Crow South. Baldwin, guided by to race riots that leave the city’s black neighborhoods in ruins.The deeply re- the social-services executive Orville Luster, searched script, by Leslie Lee, dramatizes large-scale political forces and local interviews young black residents and learns conflicts in intricate detail. Frank is in every one of Duke’s stark yet teeming of the massive uprooting of their neighbor- tableaux, which display the long-term effects and daily aggressions of racism, hoods under the guise of urban renewal. The and the struggles of organized labor, as personal experience.—Richard Brody movie’s participants speak in detail about un- employment, police harassment, despair over much of its time, was the role played by tech- roots, which emerge in Barbara’s account of the prospects of the civil-rights movement, and nology: photographs of the naked victim were the family’s move from South Carolina to anger at their own exclusion from the city’s distributed online to the offenders’ friends, and Brooklyn, and then to the suburbs. At the prosperity and governance; one young man they in turn were filmed reacting to such im- time that William was killed, Yance identi- discusses his hope for violent revolution by ages. Their jesting went viral, and thus a culture fied as a woman and hadn’t yet come out as black Americans and his belief that it can be of voracious misogyny was exposed, to the dis- queer; that aspect of his life plays a role in organized. Baldwin, talking with Luster, calls comfort of school authorities and the indigna- the story. The filmmaker is both a witness to white liberals “missionaries” unwilling to take tion—or shame—of local citizens. Schwartzman and a participant in the events of the film, and risks for comprehensive change. Baldwin’s im- talks to many of those affected, and her movie its elements of pain and guilt are reflected in mersive local inquiry creates a deeply, passion- is strewn, ominously, with the debris of social his grief-stricken, self-interrogating artistry. ately cross-sectional analysis of American life media.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of Released in 2017.—Richard Brody (Streaming and politics at the moment. (Both the director’s 4/1/19.) (Streaming on Netflix.) on Netflix.) cut and the shorter, censored broadcast version are available.)—R.B. (Streaming on Bay Area Strong Island Summer in the City Television Archive.) COURTESY FILM MOVEMENT CLASSICS Yance Ford’s extraordinarily dramatic docu- This engaged and discerning West German Tommaso mentary is both personal and investigative. documentary about Manhattan’s Upper West It’s the story of an unresolved killing: Yance’s Side, from 1968, celebrates the neighborhood’s This quasi-confessional drama about a frus- brother, William Ford, Jr., a black man, was vigorous street life while foregrounding its po- trated filmmaker, written and directed by killed in the family’s home town of Central litical activism and probing its social conflicts. Abel Ferrara, plays more like a vain boast. Islip, Long Island, in 1992, and William’s killer, The filmmakers, Christian Blackwood and Willem Dafoe gives a fierce and clench-jawed Mark Reilly, a white man, did not face charges. Robert Leacock—working with the German performance in the title role of an American in Yance reconstructs the events in his own words novelist Uwe Johnson, who wrote and delivered Rome who’s writing his new project (something and in interviews with his mother, Barbara the voice-over narration—craft a method of about hunting bears in Siberia). Tommaso lives (a retired high-school principal), his sister, collaborative portraiture, eliciting frank dis- tensely with his wife, Nikki (Cristina Chiriac, and William’s friends, including one who was cussions with a wide array of residents, includ- Ferrara’s real-life wife), and their young daugh- present at the scene. The story involves race ing two young heroin users, a family with seven ter, Deedee (Anna Ferrara, Chiriac and Fer- relations on Long Island and their historical children, and two trans women. A protest out- rara’s child). Tommaso is a controlling and condescending partner who berates Nikki over trivial domesticities and gets creepily involved with a young woman who’s his acting student; Ferrara films naked actresses playing out Tom- maso’s jejune erotic fantasies while emphasizing his sexual frustrations with Nikki. The film’s sole moments of empathy are found in scenes of recovering substance abusers speaking at meet- ings; Tommaso is among them, and he devotes one session to complaining about Nikki. He’s a self-pitying martyr to marriage and fatherhood, devoid of introspection, and the movie stays close to him throughout, with swooningly ag- grandizing camerawork and a script that offers 1no differing perspectives.—R.B. (Streaming on Lincoln Center and other sites.) For more reviews, visit newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town 10 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

For certain adults with newly diagnosed non-small cell lung cancer that has spread 1ST + ONLY CHEMO-FREE COMBO OF 2 IMMUNOTHERAPIES If you have advanced non-small cell lung cancer, there’s been a new development. Today, if you test positive for PD-L1, the chemo-free combo OPDIVO® + YERVOY® is now FDA-approved and may be your first treatment. Ask your doctor if the chemo-free combo OPDIVO + YERVOY is right for you. Learn more at lungcancerhope.com or call 1-833-OPDIVOYERVOY Indication & Important Safety Information for • Eye problems. Symptoms may include: blurry vision, double vision, or other vision OPDIVO® (nivolumab) + YERVOY® (ipilimumab) problems; and eye pain or redness. What is OPDIVO + YERVOY? Get medical help immediately if you develop any of these symptoms or they get worse. It may keep these problems from becoming more serious. Your healthcare OPDIVO® is a prescription medicine used in combination with YERVOY® (ipilimumab) team will check you for side effects during treatment and may treat you with as a first treatment for adults with a type of advanced stage lung cancer (called non- corticosteroid or hormone replacement medicines. If you have a serious side effect, small cell lung cancer) when your lung cancer has spread to other parts of your body your healthcare team may also need to delay or completely stop your treatment. (metastatic) and your tumors are positive for PD-L1, but do not have an abnormal EGFR or ALK gene. OPDIVO and OPDIVO + YERVOY can cause serious side effects, including: It is not known if OPDIVO is safe and effective in children younger than 18 years of age. • Severe infusion-related reactions. Tell your doctor or nurse right away if you get these symptoms during an infusion: chills or shaking; itching or rash; flushing; Important Safety Information for OPDIVO + YERVOY difficulty breathing; dizziness; fever; and feeling like passing out. OPDIVO is a medicine that may treat certain cancers by working with your immune Pregnancy and Nursing: system. OPDIVO can cause your immune system to attack normal organs and tissues in any area of your body and can affect the way they work. These problems can • Tell your healthcare provider if you are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. OPDIVO sometimes become serious or life-threatening and can lead to death. These problems and YERVOY can harm your unborn baby. If you are a female who is able to become may happen anytime during treatment or even after your treatment has ended. Some pregnant, your healthcare provider should do a pregnancy test before you start of these problems may happen more often when OPDIVO is used in combination receiving OPDIVO. Females who are able to become pregnant should use an effective with YERVOY. method of birth control during and for at least 5 months after the last dose. Talk to your healthcare provider about birth control methods that you can use during this YERVOY can cause serious side effects in many parts of your body which can lead to time. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you become pregnant or think you are death. These problems may happen anytime during treatment with YERVOY or after pregnant during treatment. You or your healthcare provider should contact Bristol you have completed treatment. Myers Squibb at 1-800-721-5072 as soon as you become aware of the pregnancy. Serious side effects may include: • Pregnancy Safety Surveillance Study: Females who become pregnant during treatment with YERVOY are encouraged to enroll in a Pregnancy Safety Surveillance • Lung problems (pneumonitis). Symptoms of pneumonitis may include: new or Study. The purpose of this study is to collect information about the health of you worsening cough; chest pain; and shortness of breath. and your baby. You or your healthcare provider can enroll in the Pregnancy Safety Surveillance Study by calling 1-844-593-7869. • Intestinal problems (colitis) that can lead to tears or holes in your intestine. Signs and symptoms of colitis may include: diarrhea (loose stools) or more bowel • Before receiving treatment, tell your healthcare provider if you are breastfeeding or movements than usual; blood in your stools or dark, tarry, sticky stools; and severe plan to breastfeed. It is not known if either treatment passes into your breast milk. stomach area (abdomen) pain or tenderness. Do not breastfeed during treatment and for 5 months after the last dose. • Liver problems (hepatitis). Signs and symptoms of hepatitis may include: yellowing Tell your healthcare provider about: of your skin or the whites of your eyes; severe nausea or vomiting; pain on the right side of your stomach area (abdomen); drowsiness; dark urine (tea colored); bleeding • Your health problems or concerns if you: have immune system problems such as or bruising more easily than normal; feeling less hungry than usual; and decreased autoimmune disease, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, lupus, or sarcoidosis; have energy. had an organ transplant; have lung or breathing problems; have liver problems; or have any other medical conditions. • Hormone gland problems (especially the thyroid, pituitary, adrenal glands, and pancreas). Signs and symptoms that your hormone glands are not working properly • All the medicines you take, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines, may include: headaches that will not go away or unusual headaches; extreme vitamins, and herbal supplements. tiredness; weight gain or weight loss; dizziness or fainting; changes in mood or behavior, such as decreased sex drive, irritability, or forgetfulness; hair loss; feeling The most common side effects of OPDIVO, when used in combination with YERVOY, cold; constipation; voice gets deeper; and excessive thirst or lots of urine. include: feeling tired; diarrhea; rash; itching; nausea; pain in muscles, bones, and joints, fever; cough; decreased appetite; vomiting; stomach-area (abdominal) pain; shortness • Kidney problems, including nephritis and kidney failure. Signs of kidney problems of breath; upper respiratory tract infection; headache; low thyroid hormone levels may include: decrease in the amount of urine; blood in your urine; swelling in your (hypothyroidism); decreased weight; and dizziness. ankles; and loss of appetite. These are not all the possible side effects. For more information, ask your healthcare • Skin problems. Signs of these problems may include: rash; itching; skin blistering; provider or pharmacist. Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. You are and ulcers in the mouth or other mucous membranes. encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/medwatch or call 1-800-FDA-1088. • Inflammation of the brain (encephalitis). Signs and symptoms of encephalitis may include: headache; fever; tiredness or weakness; confusion; memory problems; Please see Important Facts for OPDIVO and YERVOY, including Boxed WARNING for sleepiness; seeing or hearing things that are not really there (hallucinations); YERVOY regarding immune-mediated side effects, on the following page. seizures; and stiff neck. • Problems in other organs. Signs of these problems may include: changes in eyesight; severe or persistent muscle or joint pains; severe muscle weakness; and chest pain. Additional serious side effects observed during a separate study of YERVOY alone include: • Nerve problems that can lead to paralysis. Symptoms of nerve problems may include: unusual weakness of legs, arms, or face; and numbness or tingling in hands or feet. ©2020 Bristol-Myers Squibb Company. All rights reserved. OPDIVO®, YERVOY®, and the related logos are trademarks of Bristol-Myers Squibb Company. 7356US1904019-02-01 05/20

I M P O RTA N T The information below does not take the place of talking with your healthcare professional. Only your healthcare professional knows the specifics of your condition and how OPDIVO®  (nivolumab) in combination with FACTS YERVOY® (ipilimumab) may fit into your overall therapy. Talk to your healthcare professional if you have any questions about OPDIVO (pronounced op-DEE-voh) and YERVOY (pronounced yur-voi). What is the most important information I should know Inflammation of the brain (encephalitis). Signs and ◦ Tell your healthcare provider right away if you about OPDIVO (nivolumab) and YERVOY (ipilimumab)? symptoms of encephalitis may include: become pregnant or think you are pregnant during treatment. You or your healthcare provider should OPDIVO and YERVOY are medicines that may treat certain • headache • seizures contact Bristol Myers Squibb at 1-800-721-5072 as cancers by working with your immune system. OPDIVO and soon as you become aware of the pregnancy. YERVOY can cause your immune system to attack normal • fever • stiff neck organs and tissues in any area of your body and can affect ◦ Pregnancy Safety Surveillance Study: Females the way they work. These problems can sometimes become • tiredness or weakness who become pregnant during treatment with serious or life-threatening and can lead to death and YERVOY (ipilimumab) are encouraged to enroll in a may happen anytime during treatment or even after your • confusion Pregnancy Safety Surveillance Study. The purpose of treatment has ended. Some of these problems may happen this study is to collect information about the health more often when OPDIVO is used in combination with YERVOY. • memory problems of you and your baby. You or your healthcare provider can enroll in the Pregnancy Safety Surveillance Study YERVOY can cause serious side effects in many parts of your • sleepiness by calling 1-844-593-7869. body which can lead to death. These problems may happen anytime during treatment with YERVOY or after you have • seeing or hearing things • are breastfeeding or plan to breastfeed. It is not completed treatment. known if OPDIVO (nivolumab) or YERVOY passes into your that are not really there breast milk. Do not breastfeed during treatment and for Call or see your healthcare provider right away if you 5 months after the last dose. develop any symptoms of the following problems or (hallucinations) these symptoms get worse. Do not try to treat symptoms Tell your healthcare provider about all the medicines yourself. Problems in other organs. Signs of these problems may you take, including prescription and over-the-counter include: medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements. Lung problems (pneumonitis). Symptoms of pneumonitis may include: • changes in eyesight Know the medicines you take. Keep a list of them to show your healthcare providers and pharmacist when you get a • new or worsening cough • severe or persistent muscle or joint pains new medicine. • chest pain • severe muscle weakness What are the possible side effects of OPDIVO and YERVOY? • shortness of breath • chest pain OPDIVO and YERVOY can cause serious side effects, including: Intestinal problems (colitis) that can lead to tears or holes Additional serious side effects observed during a separate in your intestine. Signs and symptoms of colitis may include: study of YERVOY (ipilimumab) alone include: • See “What is the most important information I should know about OPDIVO and YERVOY?” • diarrhea (loose stools) or more bowel movements Nerve problems that can lead to paralysis. Symptoms of than usual nerve problems may include: • Severe infusion reactions. Tell your doctor or nurse right away if you get these symptoms during an infusion of • mucus or blood in your stools or dark, tarry, sticky stools • unusual weakness of legs, arms, or face OPDIVO or YERVOY: • stomach-area (abdomen) pain or tenderness • numbness or tingling in hands or feet ◦ chills or shaking ◦ dizziness • you may or may not have fever Eye problems. Symptoms may include: Liver problems (hepatitis) that can lead to liver failure. • blurry vision, double vision, or other vision problems Signs and symptoms of hepatitis may include: • eye pain or redness • yellowing of your skin or the whites of your eyes Get medical help immediately if you develop any of these • nausea or vomiting symptoms or they get worse. It may keep these problems from becoming more serious. Your healthcare team will • pain on the right side of your stomach area (abdomen) check you for side effects during treatment and may treat you with corticosteroid or hormone replacement medicines. • drowsiness If you have a serious side effect, your healthcare team may also need to delay or completely stop your treatment with • dark urine (tea colored) OPDIVO (nivolumab) and YERVOY. • bleeding or bruising more easily than normal ◦ itching or rash ◦ fever • feeling less hungry than usual What are OPDIVO and YERVOY? ◦ flushing ◦ feeling like passing ◦ difficulty breathing out • decreased energy OPDIVO and YERVOY are prescription medicines used to treat adults with a type of advanced stage lung cancer called The most common side effects of OPDIVO when used Hormone gland problems (especially the thyroid, pituitary, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). OPDIVO may be used in in combination with YERVOY include: and adrenal glands; and pancreas). Signs and symptoms combination with YERVOY as your first treatment for NSCLC: that your hormone glands are not working properly may • feeling tired • vomiting include: • when your lung cancer has spread to other parts of your body (metastatic), and • diarrhea • stomach-area • headaches that will not go away or unusual headaches • your tumors are positive for PD-L1, but do not have an • rash (abdominal) pain • extreme tiredness or unusual sluggishness abnormal EGFR or ALK gene. • itching • shortness of breath • weight gain or weight loss It is not known if OPDIVO and YERVOY are safe and effective • nausea when used in children younger than 18 years of age. • upper respiratory tract • dizziness or fainting infection • pain in muscles, bones, • headache • changes in mood or behavior, such as decreased sex and joints drive, irritability, or forgetfulness What should I tell my healthcare provider before receiving • low thyroid hormone OPDIVO and YERVOY? • fever • hair loss levels (hypothyroidism) Before you receive OPDIVO and YERVOY, tell your healthcare • feeling cold provider if you: • cough • decreased weight • constipation • have immune system problems (autoimmune disease) • decreased appetite • dizziness such as Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, lupus, or • voice gets deeper sarcoidosis These are not all the possible side effects of OPDIVO and YERVOY. Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. • excessive thirst or lots of urine • have had an organ transplant You may report side effects to FDA at 1-800-FDA-1088. Kidney problems, including nephritis and kidney failure. • have lung or breathing problems This is a brief summary of the most important information Signs of kidney problems may include: about OPDIVO and YERVOY. For more information, talk with • have liver problems your healthcare provider, call 1-855-673-4861, or go to • decrease in the amount of urine www.OPDIVO.com. • have any other medical conditions • blood in your urine Manufactured by: • are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. OPDIVO and Bristol-Myers Squibb Company • swelling in your ankles YERVOY can harm your unborn baby. Females who are Princeton, New Jersey 08543 USA able to become pregnant: • loss of appetite Your healthcare provider should do a pregnancy test before you start receiving OPDIVO and YERVOY. Skin Problems. Signs of these problems may include: ◦ You should use an effective method of birth control during and for at least 5 months after the last dose. • skin rash with or without itching Talk to your healthcare provider about birth control methods that you can use during this time. • itching • skin blistering or peeling • sores or ulcers in mouth or other mucous membranes © 2020 Bristol-Myers Squibb Company May 2020 OPDIVO and YERVOY are trademarks of Bristol-Myers Squibb Company. 7356US2001322-01-01 05/20

PHOTOGRAPH BY MAKEDA SANDFORD FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE 1 open & Sons Buttery, a ham-centric that looks like a Ferrari?’” In 2013, he grocery, next door. (He also owns Vyne bought a slicer on Craigslist, from a deli TABLES FOR TWO Yard, a nearby wine store.) The Buttery on Long Island, and was shocked to find was slated to début in July, but, after the that it was made, in 1910, in the United & Sons bar was forced to close, he got the shop States. American country hams, though 447 Rogers Ave., Brooklyn open for curbside pickup in April. As produced in a similar fashion to jamón of last week, customers may enter the serrano or prosciutto, have not tradition- In her 1976 book, “The Taste of Coun- premises, two at a time. ally been sliced thin, Mack noted—“You try Cooking,” the late, great chef Edna cut off hunks of it, you threw it in the Lewis wrote that, in her home town of Thanks to & Sons Buttery, I have frying pan”—but chefs including David Freetown, Virginia, a farming commu- added to my larder luscious, creamy Chang and Sean Brock were starting to nity founded by former slaves,“ham held sheets of Benton’s Extra-Aged, from treat them like the finest salumi. Mack the same rating as the basic black dress. Tennessee, hickory-smoked and hung had been excited by the renaissance of If you had a ham in the meat house, any to dry for around two years, and ruddy, American cheese and wine in the past situation could be faced.” André Mack bracingly funky slices of cured Lady couple of decades. Now was the time for has a ham in the meat house, and then Edison, from North Carolina. I have American ham. some. In January, Mack, a sommelier swooned over springy pale-pink mor- and winemaker who once ran the bev- tadella, speckled with bright-green Upending perspectives in the culi- erage program at Per Se, opened & Sons, Sicilian pistachios, made from Mid- nary world is familiar territory for Mack, a “ham bar,” in Prospect-Lefferts Gar- west-raised, heritage-breed pork by who was the first black person to win dens, with a menu offering no fewer Tempesta Artisans, a small company the prestigious Best Young Sommeliers than ten different country hams, all in Chicago. Mack recently told me Competition, hosted by a gastronomical sourced domestically, plus Ameri- that his decision to carry only domestic society founded in Paris in 1950. He can-made wines (including bottles from products has been taken by some as a started his career waiting tables at a Red his own label, Maison Noir, out of Or- nationalistic gesture, but “that’s not it,” Lobster in Texas. After college, he found egon), cheeses, and other charcuterie. he said. “The way we romanticize Italy himself watching a lot of “Frasier.”“The And then, just as he was starting to and France—I realized that we could do way they talked about wine just made it consistently fill its twenty seats, the that here. We’ve been curing hams for seem like I was missing out,”he told me. coronavirus swept through New York. over one hundred years. It’s a celebration “That show gave me the courage to walk of American food heritage.” into a wine store,”where, when someone Luckily, & Sons was always con- poured him a taste and asked what he ceived as a two-part operation: Mack, The ham that Mack grew up on was thought, he quipped, “It’s no Château who lives in the neighborhood with his of the spiral-cut, glazed, and baked va- d’Yquem”—a Frasier favorite—and got wife, the writer Phoebe Damrosch, and riety, plus a New Jersey specialty called a big laugh.“Everybody’s, like,‘How is it their four boys, had already planned to Taylor Pork Roll; his mother is from being a black man in such a white indus- Trenton, and her family was from North try?’It’s no different than any other day Carolina. As an adult, Mack developed of my life,”Mack said.“Every day I show a passion for European charcuterie, and up, I challenge the status quo. Hey, I’m for vintage meat slicers: “First time I here.That’s how I choose to confront it.” went into any Bastianich restaurant, I was, like, ‘What’s that thing back there —Hannah Goldfield THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 13

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THE TALK OF THE TOWN COMMENT another country: the traumatized ver- sent a reckoning, a kind of American AMERICAN SPRING sion of America inhabited by black peo- Spring, one long in the making and ig- ple. Fifty-two years ago, following the nited not just by a single police killing. Consider for a moment how the events storm of riots that swept through 1967 In death, George Floyd’s name has be- of May 25th through June 9th—the and 1968,the Kerner Commission report come a metaphor for the stacked ineq- days of democratic bedlam in the streets, noted that “our nation is moving toward uities of the society that produced them. bracketed by the death and the burial of two societies—one black,one white,sep- George Floyd—would appear had they arate and unequal.” Today, the weight of Race, to the degree that it represents occurred in some distant nation that most grief and poverty in this country still falls anything coherent in the United States, Americans have heard of but might not disproportionately on black shoulders. is shorthand for a specific set of life prob- be able to find on a map. Consider that, The eight minutes and forty-six seconds abilities.The inequalities between black in the midst of a pandemic whose toll during which a Minneapolis police officer and white Americans are documented was magnified by government incompe- killed George Floyd as three others in rates of morbidity and infant mortal- tence,a member of a long-exploited eth- looked on cannot be understood outside ity, wealth, and unemployment, which nic minority was killed by the state, in the context of a pandemic in which attest that although race may be a bio- an act defined by its casual sadism.Dem- African-Americans have died at three logical fiction, its reality is seen in what onstrators pour into the streets near the times the rate of white Americans. The is likely to happen in our lives.The more site of the killing, in a scene that is soon chaotic, angry, defiant tableaux in the than forty million people of African de- repeated in city after city.The police ar- streets of Minneapolis, Seattle, Los An- scent who live in the United States rec- rest members of the media reporting the geles, New York, Philadelphia, Oakland, ognize this reality, but it’s largely invis- story.The President cites a threat to law Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Louisville, ible in the lives of white Americans. As and order, and federal agents are dis- San Francisco, Indianapolis, Charleston, with men, who, upon seeing the scroll patched to disrupt protests in the na- Detroit, Baltimore, and beyond repre- of #MeToo testimonies, asked their tion’s capital, using tear gas and a mili- wives,daughters,sisters,and co-workers, ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA tary helicopter. These acts further erode “Is it really that bad?,” the shock of rev- his already tenuous position, prompting elation that attended the video of Floyd’s church leaders to rebuke him, and dec- death is itself a kind of inequality, a ba- orated generals to question his fitness rometer of the extent to which one group for office. of Americans have moved through life largely free from the burden of such ter- In such a scenario,the lines of conflict rible knowledge. gain new clarity, the abuses more un- qualified horror. American commenta- At a congressional hearing last tors would compare the successive nights Wednesday, Philonise Floyd said that of protests to the Iranian uprisings of he hoped his brother would be “more 2009 and the Arab Spring of 2011. The than a face on a T-shirt, more than a U.S. State Department, depending on name on a list that won’t stop growing.” its allegiances, might surreptitiously aid The Reverend Al Sharpton cited that the protesters. We would all recognize list, of the wrongfully dead, in the eu- the moment as the product of a trau- logy that he delivered at Floyd’s funeral, matized society. naming Ahmaud Arbery,Breonna Tay- lor, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin. He Now consider a different idea, that could have gone on: Jordan Davis,Rekia the death of George Floyd did occur in Boyd, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice. A THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 15

sentiment common among many African- nation but because it was similar to the been settled. Muriel Bowser, the mayor Americans is that these people lived and repression they’d experienced at home. of Washington, D.C., renamed a street died in Black America,which is a differ- leading to the White House Black Lives ent place from America at large—and Policing is inescapably a metaphor Matter Plaza, emblazoning the phrase that their deaths, most of which came for governmental power.The impunity on the asphalt in gigantic yellow letters. at the hands of law enforcement, rep- of the American police has been achieved The near-ubiquity of those words in the resent a broader reality, even though a by slow accretion through the decades, past three weeks—Amazon,Apple,and significant number of white Americans and with the tacit understanding that Airbnb all added some version of it to were skeptical of its existence. it would be deployed in great dispro- their home pages—has prompted a con- portion against black people.But,what- sideration of what this means in prac- The demographics of the protests ever ensues now, we are in a different tical terms. Critics on social media were that followed those deaths tended to moment. Officers in Atlanta, New York quick to assert that the truest endorse- reflect this disparity, with overwhelm- City, Buffalo, and Philadelphia have ment of Black Lives Matter lies not in ingly black crowds turning out to de- been charged with assault for their ac- what you say on your Web site but in mand justice.But Floyd’s death,and the tions against protesters. Calls to “de- what you do for your black employees. agonizing, protracted manner in which fund the police,” stripping them of all it occurred, has produced a different re- but their core law-enforcement func- The American Spring has not top- action. Seventy-one per cent of white tions, and allocating resources to other pled a power, but it has led to a reassess- Americans now say that racial discrim- community institutions,are being taken ment of the relationship between that ination is a “big problem.” They, too, seriously; in Los Angeles, Mayor Eric power and the citizens from whom it is rushed into the streets. In Salt Lake Garcetti has pledged to cut two hun- derived. It has resolved any remaining City, where the black population stands dred and fifty million dollars from the questions regarding Donald Trump’s at just two per cent, huge, raucous pro- police budget. Last week, Democrats in utter ineptitude as President; it has laid tests stretched on for days. the House of Representatives announced bare the contradictory and partial de- the Justice in Policing Act,which would mocracy that the United States holds Confronted with this challenge, the ban choke holds, mandate body cam- before the world as exemplary. Most system went on a self-incrimination eras, and establish a national registry of significant, it has clarified our terms. spree. In Atlanta, police officers used police misconduct. In Minnesota, Gov- Floyd’s life is the awful price we have stun guns against two college students ernor Tim Walz endorsed a package paid for a momentarily common tongue, as they sat in a car; in Buffalo, officers of comprehensive police reforms. The a language that precisely conveys what shoved a seventy-five-year-old man to Louisville city council passed Breonna’s we are speaking of when we say “Amer- the ground, while others walked past Law, for Breonna Taylor, banning the ican.” Fourteen successive days of pro- as he lay bleeding; in Brooklyn, two no-knock warrants that enabled the po- test opened the possibility that George N.Y.P.D. S.U.V.s drove into protesters. lice to shoot her while she was in bed. Floyd died in America, not simply in Images of such incidents spurred pro- its black corollary.The task that remains tests and acts of solidarity in dozens of There have been other developments. is to insure that more of us might ac- countries. For many people, what they The argument once mired in pointless tually live there. saw was astonishing not because it was circumambulation, between “All Lives contrary to what they’d heard of this Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter,” has —Jelani Cobb THE BENCH cable news to talk about the case; shortly when a family hires Crump as its law- WINNING BUT LOSING afterward, protests erupted in Florida. yer, he becomes its publicist, lobbyist, (Zimmerman was eventually acquit- and therapist, too. “And I suspect,” the If you turn on your TV and see Ben- ted.) Two years later, Crump took on classmate added, “that, by the end, he jamin Crump, it usually means that another high-profile case, after Mi- becomes a family member.” Before something terrible has happened. chael Brown was shot dead by Darren Floyd’s funeral in Houston, Crump Crump is the go-to civil-rights attor- Wilson, a police officer, in Ferguson, helped Floyd’s son, Quincy Mason, put ney for families who have lost a loved Missouri. (More protests; Wilson was on his necktie. one to police violence; he is often re- never charged.) Now Crump is repre- ferred to as “the black Gloria Allred.” senting the family of George Floyd, But some activists aren’t buying it. In 2012,after Trayvon Martin was killed who was killed, three weeks ago, by When Crump announced his involve- by George Zimmerman, in a suburb of Derek Chauvin, a cop in Minneapolis, ment in the Floyd case, he was in- Orlando, Martin’s family hired Crump, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for nearly stantly derided on Twitter as an “op- who is based in Tallahassee, to repre- nine minutes. “It was the knee of the portunist” with a “losing track record.” sent them. He made the rounds on entire police department that killed (Stephon Adams, a supporter of the George Floyd,” Crump said. Black Lives Matter movement who lives in Birmingham,Alabama,tweeted, Crump is fifty years old,with a round “If I am ever killed by a police or by a face and a bald head. He wears a gold white person PLEASE MAKE SURE eagle lapel pin. One of his former law- MY FAMILY DOES NOT HIRE school classmates recently said that, BEN CRUMP! He is just as horrible 16 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

Benjamin Crump losing them. He is known for generat- bodily harm to him.’ That’s premedi- ing buzz before a trial. (“We can’t con- tated murder.” as those ambulance chasing attorneys.”) trol anything in the criminal case,” he Some of this criticism seems to stem said. “So all you can do is try to advo- If convicted, Chauvin would get life cate and argue in the court of public in prison. Kami Chavis, a professor of from a misunderstanding of Crump’s opinion.”) This publicity can be crucial; law and the director of the criminal-jus- role in criminal cases. In the event of a sometimes it’s the only reason a trial tice program at Wake Forest University police killing, murder and manslaugh- happens at all.Crump is one of the law- School of Law, in North Carolina, said ter cases are tried by local prosecutors, yers for the family of Ahmaud Arbery, that this drive for a first-degree charge not by attorneys for hire. In the Floyd the black jogger who was killed by two likely stems from “years of seeing black case, the prosecution of Chauvin, and white men in Georgia, in February. It lives treated like they don’t matter.”Still, of the three other cops who helped him was only after a video of the shooting she said, “when I look at the evidence restrain Floyd, will be led by Keith El- went viral that the two men were ar- we have at this point, I believe that sec- lison, Minnesota’s attorney general. rested, seventy-four days after the mur- ond-degree murder is appropriate.”Even While the state works on the criminal der. But, when an entire nation is out the Internet mob is asking Crump to case, Crump will pursue civil action: a for blood,prosecutors can feel pressured stand down. “We are all literally beg- wrongful-death lawsuit against the city to overcharge defendants.(After George ging you to keep the charges at 2nd de- of Minneapolis. Zimmerman’s trial, legal analysts said gree so there’s actually a conviction,” that if the prosecutors had pursued a @0liviaGrace_ tweeted. Given how sympathetic juries tend charge of manslaughter, rather than the to be toward police officers, the civil more serious one of second-degree mur- Asked about these critiques, Crump case is often the only case that can be der, they would have been more likely said,“If this was a black person who did won. Crump helped Michael Brown’s to secure a conviction.) it,nobody would be questioning whether family win a $1.5 million settlement it’s first-degree murder. So we’re saying from the city of Ferguson, and he In the past couple of weeks, the charge him to the full extent of the law.” helped Trayvon Martin’s family settle, charges against the cops who killed for an undisclosed sum, with the home- George Floyd have been elevated.Chau- How does Crump end up on so many owners’ association in the neighbor- vin was initially charged with third-de- high-profile police-violence cases? hood where Martin was killed. If gree murder and second-degree man- “There aren’t many options for black Crump loses a case, he doesn’t charge slaughter, but prosecutors then added people when they get killed by the po- anything. But if he wins he takes a a charge of second-degree murder.(The lice,”he explained.“What are you gonna third of the money awarded. He has other three officers now face charges of do? Turn to the police? They’re the ones fought more than two hundred po- aiding and abetting second-degree mur- who killed you.” A couple of months lice-violence cases, and he has won der and manslaughter.) The elevated before George Floyd was murdered, cash settlements in all of them. “We charges could add up to an extra thirty Breonna Taylor,a young E.M.T.in Lou- have never not recovered for these fam- years in prison, but, according to Ra- isville, Kentucky, was shot at least eight ilies,” he said. But the officers rarely chel Barkow, a criminal-law professor times by the police during a raid at her end up in prison, and the murders go and a vice-dean at the N.Y.U. School home. The cops who killed Taylor ha- on. Crump could be the winningest of Law, they could make conviction ven’t been arrested. They haven’t even attorney in the country who still reeks much trickier. “It is absolutely the case been fired. But Crump’s working on it. of failure. that it’ll be harder to win on the second- degree-murder theory than it would be 1“We’ve already filed the lawsuit,”he said. Other people say that,even if Crump on third-degree,”she said.“We’re talking —Tyler Foggatt did not lead those unsuccessful crimi- about it now, in the middle of nation- nal cases, he’s still partly responsible for wide protests and the horror of the video, TUNING IN but these cases go to juries, and there TESTIMONY they become a bit more complicated.” Since the beginning of the corona- Crump is calling for the charges to virus pandemic, the New York City be upped once again, to first-degree Council has held its public hearings murder. This would mean proving be- remotely, via video. Last week, its com- yond a reasonable doubt that the murder mittee on public safety convened on- of George Floyd was premeditated. line, after days of protests against po- “We think that it can be proved,” lice brutality, to consider a series of Crump said. “We think that there was amendments to the city’s administra- intent. When the officer says, on the tive code.One proposed new rule would body-cam audio, ‘He doesn’t have a make choke holds a misdemeanor; pulse, we should turn him on his side,’ another would codify citizens’rights to and Chauvin says, ‘Nope, we keep him in this position,’ Chauvin is literally telling them, ‘I intend to cause serious THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 17

record police activity.The meeting also pressions, or the Heimlich maneuver.” as he was arrested, “Look at him shak- offered residents their first opportu- Several dozen citizens had joined nity, since the protests began, to testify ing like a little bitch.” about their experiences with police in the hearing remotely. When their mi- front of a government body with the crophones were finally unmuted, each After Jess La Bombalera, of East power to regulate. participant was given three minutes to speak. “I am here because, clearly, the Harlem, called out “all these white “Today, we are going to remind the N.Y.P.D.have been allowed to get away New York City Police Department that with literal murder for almost a de- New Yorkers who waited for hours they work for us,” Donovan Richards, cade,” a woman named Jessica New the chair of the committee, said. He said. She added, in an exasperated tone, with us to be able to speak, and then represents a district in Queens where “I also see that the police are now off more than a thousand people have died of this call, which is not ideal.” did not yield their time to black and of Covid-19. He sat in front of photo- graphs of Muhammad Ali and Martin The testimonies continued for the brown indigenous New Yorkers,” a Luther King, Jr., and a poster that fea- next five hours. Jillian Primiano, who tured his own picture under the words works as an emergency-room nurse in few of the white participants gave up “Reading Takes You Places.” Richards Bushwick, testified from her couch, said that he was first stopped and frisked wearing blue scrubs, about a June 4th their place in line. Eventually, even at the age of thirteen. He pointed out protest in the Bronx, where marchers that the N.Y.P.D. commissioner, Der- were kettled by police before curfew Councilman Richards seemed to tire mot Shea, had sent his deputy, Benja- and arrested once the clock struck eight. min Tucker, who is black, to the hear- “I am for the abolition of all armed of hearing from New Yorkers who ing.Richards said,“Commissioner Shea racist gangs in this country,” she said. had an opportunity to answer for the “Especially the N.Y.P.D.” She rattled were new to protesting police brutal- actions of the department in the mid- off a list of what she had seen during dle of a major crisis over the history of the protests: head injuries, seizures, bro- ity. “You’re addressing a black chair racialized brutality in the city, and he ken knees and legs, and atrial fibrilla- sends the black man who didn’t get the tions. She contradicted Tucker’s asser- who lives in southeast Queens, in Far job.That’s just shameful.”He addressed tion that arrested protesters had access Tucker: “You shouldn’t have to answer to soap and water and masks in jail. Rockaway,” he said. “We don’t need for him.” “They did not give me a mask,” she said. “There was no soap and water.” 1to be lectured.” Tucker read a written response. He —Emily Witt called the death of George Floyd, at People called for the resignations of the hands of Minneapolis police officers, Commissioner Shea and Mayor Bill THIS IS AMERICA “an atrocity . . . and deeply damaging to de Blasio. “We don’t feel like there’s SO BRUTAL A DEATH police-community relations here in New anybody else in this city we can talk to York and everywhere in our nation.”He right now,” a man named John Farns- Iwas twenty when Yusuf K. Hawkins, also spoke about some of the proposed worth told the council.“It feels like the a sixteen-year-old African-American amendments. Making choke holds a whole world has gone insane and we’ve man, was attacked by a mob of about misdemeanor, he said, would “criminal- got militarized police on our streets thirty white teen-agers armed with ize the rendering of C.P.R., chest com- that don’t answer to anyone.” baseball bats and then shot to death, on August 23, 1989, in Bensonhurst, Charlie Monlouis-Anderle, a doula, Brooklyn. Hawkins had gone to the a breastfeeding counsellor, and a pro- predominantly white neighborhood to fessional chef from Crown Heights, buy a car. In the days and weeks fol- had their arm in a sling. “My arm was lowing his death, there were marches, broken by the police on Wednesday led by the Reverend Al Sharpton and night, June 3rd, during a peaceful pro- a coalition of civil-rights organizations, test,” they said. “As they pinned my through the neighborhood where Haw- arms, legs, and head to the ground, my kins was killed. whole body went limp and my bladder released.” (The police had lifted them At the time of Hawkins’s murder, up by their zip-tied arms, breaking the I had been in the United States for right one.) It took ninety minutes for only eight years. Having spent my them to receive medical attention. childhood living under a ruthless dic- tatorship in Haiti and being constantly Ziggy Leecock, of the South Bronx, reminded to avoid the wrath of sol- reported that officers called protesters diers and henchmen, I was already “ ‘pussies,’like they were having a fight haunted by stories of beatings, tor- in high school.”Eric Yue showed scabs ture, and extrajudicial killings. This from where zip ties had cut into his was, in part, why I went to a massive wrists. He described an officer saying, protest in downtown Brooklyn a week after the murder. The march, called A Day of Outrage and Mourning, was attended by more than seven thousand people. I took my teen-age brothers with me, and I remember fearing—as we marched down Flat- 18 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

bush Avenue, shouting, “No justice, asphyxiation of George Floyd, his neck breath, George Floyd reached out to no peace”—that one day I might be crushed beneath the bent knee of Derek and became all of us. He has joined chanting for them. Chauvin for nearly nine minutes, as a vast community of people, across two other officers dug their knees into the globe, who see echoes of the in- We came close on August 9, 1997, Floyd’s back. It is the stuff of many Af- justices and the inequalities of their when a family friend, Abner Louima, rican-American families’ worst night- own societies in his American story, in a case of mistaken identity, was ar- mares, a public torture and execution and recognize their own torment in rested outside a Brooklyn night club, by uniformed representatives of the his suffering. Floyd’s seemingly un- then pummelled with the fists, radios, state, who seem equally unconcerned ending death, in the midst of a pan- flashlights, and nightsticks of several about the life they’re extinguishing and demic that has disproportionately police officers, then sexually assaulted the consequences they appear certain killed black, brown, and indigenous with a wooden broom handle inside they will never face. It is also the type people, also underscores the fact that a precinct bathroom. Some black im- of thing that many immigrants thought many of us are mourning, and are un- migrant parents harbor the illusion they were leaving behind when they certain about how long we ourselves that if their émigré and U.S.-born moved here. will be able to breathe. children are the most polite, the best dressed, and the hardest working in Describing the reaction of some of In images of the solidarity protests school, they might somehow escape Minnesota’s Somali refugees to the sa- from more than fifty countries around the brunt of systemic racism. But the distic killing of Floyd, Fartun Weli, the the world—Syria, Brazil, Australia, myth of the good immigrant as ex- executive director of Isuroon—a non- South Africa—people march, chant- empt from police assault and murder profit organization that supports So- ing, “No justice, no peace” and “Black kept getting shattered around us. By mali families—told the Minneapolis lives matter.” George Floyd’s name is the February 4, 1999, killing of Ama- Star Tribune,“They were like,‘We can’t not the only one being called. The dou Diallo, a twenty-three-year-old believe it. This is America.’” names of their own Breonna Taylors, Guinean, slaughtered on his doorstep Ahmaud Arberys, Sandra Blands, and by nineteen of the forty-one police At the same time, the image of Trayvon Martins also ring out, as part bullets aimed at him as he reached for these police officers squeezing the life of a long and growing list. “It’s always his wallet; by the March 16, 2000, out of Floyd might serve as a meta- the same story. Only the names change” shooting of Patrick Dorismond, the phor for the way U.S. Administra- read a cardboard sign held up by a pro- twenty-six-year-old son of Haitian tions have, for generations, dealt with tester in Paris. immigrants, by undercover officers. the countries many of us come from— through invasions, occupations, wars, Another sign reads “STOP KILLING Thousands of people, in the United the buttressing of dictators, and the US.”This “us” has grown exponentially States and around the world, have had removal of democratically elected gov- and has become more vocal and more their own awakenings—from joining ernments, among other tactics. In the visible than George Floyd or his kill- protests to becoming part of move- agony of his final moments, while cry- ers could have ever imagined. ments—after watching the on-camera ing out for his mama, water, and At recent rallies and protests near SKETCHPAD BY RONALD WIMBERLY my home, in Miami, in addition to cries for justice for George Floyd and other victims of police and vigilante murder, I have observed spoken-word recitals, calls to defund the police and to end mass incarceration, and pleas for people to go out and vote. I have also heard music, drumming, and political hip-hop blasting from cars trailing the crowds. At times, also playing in the back of my mind are the words of the Miami-based poet and activist Aja Monet, from her poem “#sayhername”: I am not here to say look at me how I died so brutal a death I deserve a name to fit all the horror in I am here to tell you how if they mentioned me in their protest and their rallies they would have to face their role in it too my beauty too —Edwidge Danticat THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 19

PERSONAL HISTORY ferson. Demetrius Bryan Hollins. Jac- queline Craig and her children. And THE TRAYVON GENERATION then the iconic: Alton Sterling. Eric Garner. Sandra Bland. Walter Scott. For Solo, Simon, Robel, Maurice, Cameron, and Sekou. Breonna Taylor. Philando Castile. BY ELIZABETH ALEXANDER Sandra Bland filmed the prelude to her death. The policeman thrust a stun gun in her face and said, “I will light you up.” This one was shot in his grand- weight on his neck.“I can’t breathe”and, Icall the young people who grew up in “BLUE BLACK BOY” (1997). © CARRIE MAE WEEMS. mother’s yard.This one was carry- then, “Mama!” George Floyd cried. the past twenty-five years the Tray- ing a bag of Skittles.This one was play- George Floyd cried, “Mama . . . I’m von Generation.They always knew these COURTESY THE ARTIST AND JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY ing with a toy gun in front of a gazebo. through!” stories.These stories formed their world Black girl in bright bikini. Black boy view.These stories helped instruct young holding cell phone. This one danced His mother had been dead for two African-Americans about their embodi- like a marionette as he was shot down years when George Floyd called out for ment and their vulnerability.The stories in a Chicago intersection. The words, her as he was being lynched. Lynching were primers in fear and futility.The sto- the names:Trayvon, Laquan, bikini, ga- is defined as a killing committed by a ries were the ground soil of their rage. zebo, loosies, Skittles, two seconds, I mob. I call the four police officers who These stories instructed them that anti- can’t breathe,traffic stop,dashboard cam, arrested him a mob. black hatred and violence were never far. sixteen times. His dead body lay in the street in the August heat for four hours. The kids got shot and the grownups They watched these violations up close got shot. Which is to say, the kids and on their cell phones, so many times He was jogging, was hunted down, watched their peers shot down and their over. They watched them in near-real cornered by a pickup truck, and shot parents’ generation get gunned down time. They watched them crisscrossed three times. One of the men who mur- and beat down and terrorized as well. and concentrated. They watched them dered him leaned over his dead body The agglomerating spectacle continues. on the school bus. They watched them and was heard to say, “Fucking nigger.” Here are a few we know less well: Danny under the covers at night.They watched Ray Thomas. Johnnie Jermaine Rush. them often outside of the presence of I can’t breathe, again. Eight minutes Nania Cain. Dejuan Hall. Atatiana Jef- adults who loved them and were charged and forty-six seconds of a knee and full with keeping them safe in body and soul. This is the generation of my sons, now twenty-two and twenty years old, and their friends who are also children to me, and the university students I have taught and mentored and loved. And this is also the generation of Darnella Frazier, the seventeen-year-old Minne- apolis girl who came upon George Floyd’s murder in progress while on an every- day run to the corner store on May 25th, filmed it on her phone, and posted it to her Facebook page at 1:46 A.M., with the caption “They killed him right in front of cup foods over south on 38th  and Chicago!! No type of sympathy </3 </3 #POLICEBRUTALITY.” When insideMPD.com (in an article that is no longer up) wrote,“Man Dies After Med- ical Incident During Police Interaction,” Frazier posted at 3:10 a.m.,“Medical in- cident??? Watch outtt they killed him and the proof is clearlyyyy there!!” Darnella Frazier,seventeen years old, witnessing a murder in close proxim- ity, making a record that would have worldwide impact, returned the follow- ing day to the scene of the crime. She possessed the language to say, precisely, 20 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 ART WORK BY CARRIE MAE WEEMS

through tears, “It’s so traumatizing.” purpose on earth is to keep you alive has low-grade, undiagnosed depression and In Toni Morrison’s “Sula,” which is never totally dissipated. Magical think- not black hipster ennui?” Why, in fact, ing on all sides. did Earn drop out of Princeton? Why set across the bleak black stretch of Ohio does Van get high before a drug test? after the First World War, the charac- I want my children—all of them— Why does Issa keep blowing up her life? ter Hannah plaintively asks her mother, to thrive, to be fully alive. How do we This season,“Insecure”deals directly with Eva Peace, “Mamma, did you ever love measure what that means? What does the question of young black people and us?” To paraphrase Eva Peace’s reply: it mean for our young people to be “black mental-health issues: Molly is in and out Love you? Love you? I kept you alive. alive and looking back at you,” as June of therapy, and we learn that Nathan, Jordan puts it in her poem “Who Look a.k.a. LyftBae, who was ghosting Issa, I believed I could keep my sons alive at Me”? How to access the sources of has been dealing with bipolar disorder. by loving them, believed in the magical strength that transcend this American The work of the creative icon of their powers of complete adoration and a love nightmare of racism and racist violence? generation often brings me to the ques- ethic that would permeate their lives. What does it mean to be a lucky mother, tion: Why is Kendrick so sad? He has My love was armor when they were small. when so many of my sisters have had been frank about his depression and sui- My love was armor when their father their children taken from them by this cidal thoughts. It isn’t just the spectre of died of a heart attack when they were hatred? The painter Titus Kaphar’s re- race-based violence and death that hangs twelve and thirteen. “They think black cent Time magazine cover portrays a over these young people. It’s that com- men only die when they get shot,” my black mother cradling what should be pounded with the constant display of in- older son said in the aftermath. My love her child across the middle of her body, equity that has most recently been laid was armor when that same year our com- but the child is literally cut out of the bare in the Covid-19 pandemic, with ra- munity’s block watch sent e-mails warn- canvas and cut out of the mother, leav- cial health disparities that are shocking ing residents about “two black kids on ing a gaping wound for an unending even to those of us inured to our dispro- bikes” and praising neighbors who had grief that has made a sisterhood of portionate suffering. called the police on them. My love for countless black women for generations. my children said, Move. My love said, Black creativity emerges from long Follow your sons, when they ran into the My sons were both a little shy out- lines of innovative responses to the dark streets of New York to join pro- side of our home when they were grow- death and violence that plague our com- testers after Eric Garner’s killer was ac- ing up. They were quiet and observant, munities. “Not a house in the country quitted. When my sons were in high like their father, who had come to this ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead school and pictures of Philando Castile country as a refugee from Eritrea: Af- Negro’s grief,” Toni Morrison wrote in were on the front page of the Times, I rican observant, immigrant observant, “Beloved,”and I am interested in creative wanted to burn all the newspapers so missing nothing.I’ve watched them over emergences from that ineluctable fact. they would not see the gun coming in the years with their friends,doing dances the window, the blood on Castile’s now outmoded with names I persist in There are so many visual artists re- T-shirt, the terror in his partner’s face, loving—Nae Nae, Hit Dem Folks–– sponding to this changing same: Henry and the eyes of his witnessing baby girl. and talking about things I didn’t teach Taylor,Michael Rakowitz,Ja’Tovia Gary, But I was too late, too late generation- them and reading books I haven’t read Carrie Mae Weems, lauren woods, Al- ally, because they were not looking at and taking positions I don’t necessarily exandra Bell, Black Women Artists for the newspaper; they were looking at their hold, and I marvel. They are grown Black Lives Matter, Steffani Jemison, phones, where the image was a house of young men.With their friends,they talk Kerry James Marshall,Titus Kaphar.To mirrors straight to Hell. about the pressure to succeed, to have pause at one work: Dread Scott’s “A Man a strong public face, to excel. They talk Was Lynched by Police Yesterday,”which My love was both rational and fan- their big talk,they talk their hilarity,and he made in the wake of the police shoot- tastical. Can I protect my sons from they talk their fear. When I am with ing of Walter Scott, in 2015, echoes the being demonized? Can I keep them them,I truly believe the kids are all right flag reading “A man was lynched yes- from moving free? But they must be and will save us. terday” that the N.A.A.C.P. flew out- able to move as free as wind! If I listen side its New York headquarters between to their fears, will I comfort them? If I But I worry about this generation of 1920 and 1938 to mark the lynchings of share my fears, will I frighten them? young black people and depression. I black people in the United States. Will racism and fear disable them? If have a keen eye—what Gwendolyn we ignore it all, will it go away? Will Brooks called “gobbling mother-eye”— I want to turn to three short films dealing with race fill their minds like for these young people, sons and friends that address the Trayvon Generation stones and block them from thinking and students whom I love and encour- with particular power: Flying Lotus’s of a million other things? Let’s be clear age and welcome into my home, keep in “Until the Quiet Comes” (2012); his about what motherhood is. A being touch with and check in on. How are “Never Catch Me,” with Kendrick La- comes onto this earth and you are you, how are you, how are you. How are mar (2014); and Lamar’s “Alright”(2015). charged with keeping it alive. It dies if you, baby, how are you. I am interested you do not tend it. It is as simple as that. in the vision of television shows like “At- In “Until the Quiet Comes,” the di- No matter how intellectual and multi- lanta”and “Insecure,”about which I have rector, Kahlil Joseph, moves us through colored motherhood becomes as chil- been asking every young person who will black Los Angeles—Watts,to be specific. dren grow older, the part that says My listen, “Don’t you think they’re about In the fiction of the video, a boy stands THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 21

in an empty swimming pool, pointing and, smiling with the joy of mischievous “Slaves sing most when they are most his finger as a gun and shooting. The escapees,drive away.Kids are not allowed unhappy.” Our dancing is our pleasure bullet ricochets off the wall of the pool to drive; kids are not allowed to die. but perhaps it is also our sorrow song. and he drops as it appears to hit him. The boy lies in a wide-arced swath of What does it mean for a black boy My sons love to dance. I have raised his blood, a portrait in the empty pool. to fly,to dream of flying and tran- them to young adulthood.They are beau- He is another black boy down, another scending? To imagine his vincible body tiful. They are funny. They are strong. body of the traumatized community. all-powerful, a body that in this society They are fascinating.They are kind.They is so often consumed as a money-maker are joyful in friendship and community. In an eerie twilight, we move into and an object of perverse desire, per- They are righteous and smart in their the densely populated Nickerson Gar- ceived to have superhuman and thus politics.They are learning.They are lov- dens, where a young man, played by the threatening powers? In the video for ing. They are mighty and alive. dancer Storyboard P, lies dead.Then he Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,”directed by rises,and begins a startling dance of res- Colin Tilley, Lamar flies through the Irecall many sweaty summer parties urrection, perhaps coming back to life. California city streets, above sidewalks with family friends where the grown- The community seems numb, oblivious and empty lots, alongside wire fences. ups regularly acted up on the dance floor of his rebirth. That rebirth is brief; he and the kids d.j.’d to see how quickly gets into a low-rider car, that L.A. icon. “Alright” has been the anthem of they could make their old-school par- The car drives off after his final death many protests against racism and po- ents and play-uncles and aunties holler dance, taking him from this life to the lice violence and unjust treatment.Lamar “Aaaaayyyy! That’s my jam!” They other side. His death is consecrated by embodies the energy and the message watched us with deep amusement. But his performance, a ritual that the sud- of the resonant phrase “black lives mat- they would dance, too. One of the aun- den dead are not afforded. The car be- ter,”which Patrice Cullors,Alicia Garza, ties glimpsed my sons around the cor- comes a hearse, a space of ritual trans- and Opal Tometi catapulted into circu- ner in the next room and said, “Oh, my port into the next life. But the young lation when, in 2013, they founded the God,they can dance!They’ve been hold- man is still gone. movement. The phrase was apt then ing out on us, acting all shy!” and now. Its coinage feels both ances- What does it mean to be able to bring tral in its knowledge and prophetic in When I told a sister-friend that my together the naturalistic and the vision- its ongoing necessity. I know now with older son, during his freshman year in ary, to imagine community as capable certainty that there will never be a mo- college, was often the one controlling of reanimating even its most hopeless ment when we will not need to say it, the aux cord, dancing and dancing and and anesthetized members? What does not in my lifetime, and not in the life- dancing, she said, “Remember, people it mean for a presumably murdered black time of the Trayvon Generation. dance when they are joyful.” body to come to life in his community in a dance idiom that is uniquely part The young black man flying in La- Yes, I am saying I measure my suc- of black culture and youth culture, all mar’s video is joyful and defiant, rising cess as a mother of black boys in part of that power channelled into a lifting? above the streets that might claim him, by the fact that I have sons who love to his body liberated and autonomous. At dance, who dance in community, who A sibling to Joseph’s work is Hiro the end of the video,a police officer raises dance till their powerful bodies sweat, Murai’s video for Flying Lotus’s “Never a finger to the young man in the sky and who dance and laugh, who dance and Catch Me.”It opens at a funeral for two mimes pulling the trigger.The wounded shout. Who are able––in the midst of children, a black boy and girl, who lie young man falls,slowly—another brother their studying and organizing,their fear, heartbreak-beautiful in their open cas- down—and lands.The gun was a finger; their rage, their protesting, their vulner- kets. Their community grieves incon- the flying young man appears safe. He ability,their missteps and triumphs,their solably in the church. The scene is one does not get up. But in the final image knowledge that they must fight the of profound mourning. of this dream he opens his eyes and smiles. hydra-headed monster of racism and For a moment, he has not been killed. racial violence that we were not able to And then the children open their eyes cauterize––to find the joy and the power and climb out of their caskets.They dance Black celebration is a village practice of communal self-expression. explosively in front of the pulpit before that has brought us together in protest running down the aisle and out of the and ecstasy around the globe and across This essay is not a celebration, nor church. The mourners cannot see this time. Community is a mighty life force is it an elegy. resurrection, for it is a fantasia.The kids for self-care and survival. But it does dance another dance of black L.A., the not protect against murder. Dance it- We are no longer enslaved.Langston force of black bodily creativity, that ex- self will not free us. We continue to Hughes wrote that we must stand atop pressive life source born of violence and struggle against hatred and violence. I the racial mountain, “free within our- violation that have upturned the world believe that this generation is more vul- selves,”and I pray that those words have for generations. The resurrected babies nerable,and more traumatized,than the meaning for our young people. But our dance with a pumping force. But the last. I think of Frederick Douglass’s freedom must be seized and reasserted community’s grief is unmitigated, be- words upon hearing slaves singing their every day. cause, once again, this is a dreamscape. sorrow songs in the fields.He laid waste The children spring out into the light to the nascent myth of the happy darky: People dance to say, I am alive and and climb into a car—no,it is a hearse— in my body. I am black alive and looking back at you.  22 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

SHOUTS & MURMURS climbed onto the tracks now saying rude, nasty things like “Help! Help!”? The Sneaky Doctor There is a runaway trolley speeding down the tracks toward two million people. You can pull a lever and change the trol- ley’s path so that it hits only about a hun- dred thousand people. Instead of thinking about pulling the lever, perhaps you could retweet a con- spiracy theory that New York doctors are running a black market for ventilators? PRESIDENTIAL The Cure Worse Than the Disease TROLLEY PROBLEMS There is a runaway trolley speeding down BY RIANE KONC the tracks toward millions of people.You can pull a lever that will save hundreds LUCI GUTIÉRREZ The Paint Job ley for no reason, many more lives would of thousands of lives. But there’s a prob- have been lost? You made the tough call; lem: the lever is greasy, and if you touch There is a runaway trolley speeding down you said,“You know, let’s not drop a nu- it not only will your hands get gunk on the tracks toward five people. You can clear bomb on the trolley for no reason.” them but you’ll also stain your shirt.And pull a lever and change the trolley’s path you like that shirt. so that it hits only one person, but you Everyone keeps trying to change the aren’t aware of this option because you’re subject with all this talk about a lever— You hate to say it, but, in this case, too busy spray-painting “THE CHINESE but, in the meantime, no one says thank could the solution be worse than the prob- TRAIN” on the side of the trolley. you. No one says thank you very much lem? And why hasn’t anyone on the tracks for not dropping a nuclear bomb on the complimented your nice, crisp shirt? Question: Will your approval rating trolley for no reason. go up by two percentage points, or by The Retirement Plan seven? The Sacrificial Grandparent There is a runaway trolley speeding down The Super-Shocking Surprise There is a runaway trolley speeding down the tracks. If it continues on its path, it the tracks toward a giant bag of money. will run into millions of retirement funds. There is a runaway trolley speeding You can pull a lever and change the trol- You can pull a lever and change the trol- down the tracks toward five people.You ley’s path so that, instead of hitting the ley’s path so that it runs into millions of can pull a lever and change the trolley’s money, it hits a million grandmothers. people instead, thank God. path so that it hits only one person. Technically, the trolley should be able This should be simple: All people This one is simple, so the only ques- to come to a stop long before a disas- want to kill their grandmother, right? tion is: Isn’t it cool that you get to pull ter occurs, but two years ago you cut the But if you kill your grandmother that the lever and still call yourself “pro-life”? trolley’s brakes. means she won’t be able to send you a five-dollar bill every year on your birth- The Conductor Who could have seen this coming? day and sometimes on Easter. So there’s a lot to consider. A runaway trolley is speeding down the The Contingency Plan tracks toward millions of people. There The Trolley Advisory is a lever that can be pulled to slow the There is a runaway trolley speeding trolley and save thousands of lives, but down the tracks toward five people. But There is a runaway trolley speeding only the train conductor can pull it. there is a lever you can pull and change down the tracks toward millions of the trolley’s path so that it hits only one. people. The number could have been So, why is everyone screaming at you? much smaller, but, until recently, you Why do they keep yelling crazy things Whom should you put in charge of were loudly encouraging people to like “You’re the conductor—do some- pulling the lever? I mean, it’s easy: the climb onto the tracks and speculating thing!”? What? Just because you’re wear- guy who doesn’t believe in trolleys,right? publicly about whether the trolley even ing the conductor’s uniform? Is it because existed. Still, if you act now, you can you’ve been yelling for the entire train The Hero help thousands of people get off the ride about how great it was that they gave tracks before the trolley arrives. you the train-conductor job and how you There is a runaway trolley speeding down have probably set a record for train con- the tracks toward millions of people.But Why are so many of the people who ducting, whatever that means? has anybody thought about how, if you had dropped a nuclear bomb on the trol- How do you explain that you never wanted to actually do the work of con- ducting a train—and that you just wanted to wear the stupid hat?  THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 23

AMERICAN CHRONICLES happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happen- THE RIOT REPORT ing again and again?” Johnson wanted to know why black people were still pro- What government commissions say about protests for racial justice. testing,after Congress had finally passed landmark legislation, not only the Vot- BY JILL LEPORE ing Rights Act but also the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and a raft of anti-poverty Detroit, July 25, 1967. Thousands of U.S. troops were deployed to the city. programs.Or maybe he really didn’t want to know why. When the Kerner Com- On February 14, 1965, back from a shackles of those fierce and ancient mission submitted its report, the Presi- AFP / GETTY trip to Los Angeles, and a week bonds.”Five days later, Watts was swept dent refused to acknowledge it. before he was killed in New York, Mal- by violence and flames, following a pro- colm X gave a speech in Detroit.“Broth- test against police brutality.The author- There’s a limit to the relevance of the ers and sisters, let me tell you, I spend ities eventually arrested nearly four thou- so-called race riots of the nineteen-sixties my time out there in the street with peo- sand people; thirty-four people died. to the protests of the moment. But the ple, all kind of people, listening to what “How is it possible, after all we’ve ac- tragedy is: they’re not irrelevant. Nor is they have to say,” he said. “And they’re complished?”Johnson asked.“How could the history that came before. The lan- dissatisfied, they’re disillusioned, they’re it be? Is the world topsy-turvy?” guage changes, from “insurrection” to fed up, they’re getting to the point of “uprising” to the bureaucratic “civil dis- frustration where they are beginning to Two years later, after thousands of order,”terms used to describe everything feel: What do they have to lose?” police officers and National Guard troops from organized resistance to mayhem. blocked off fourteen square miles of New- But, nearly always, they leave a bloody That summer, President Lyndon B. ark and nearly five thousand troops from trail in the historical record, in the form Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. the 82nd and the 101st Airborne were of government reports.The Kerner Re- In a ceremony at the Capitol Rotunda deployed to Detroit, where seven thou- port followed centuries of official and attended by Martin Luther King, Jr., sand people were arrested, Johnson con- generally hysterical government inqui- Johnson invoked the arrival of enslaved vened a National Advisory Commission ries into black rebellion, from the un- Africans in Jamestown, in 1619: “They on Civil Disorders, chaired by Illinois’s hinged “A Journal of the proceedings in came in darkness and they came in chains. governor, Otto Kerner, Jr., and charged the Detection of the Conspiracy formed And today we strike away the last major it with answering three questions:“What by some White People, in conjunction with Negro and other Slaves, for burn- ing the City of New-York in America, and murdering the Inhabitants,”in 1744, to the largely fabricated “Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes,charged with an attempt to raise an insurrection in the state of South-Carolina,” in 1822. The white editor of the as-told-to (and highly dubious) “The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late In- surrection in Southampton, Va. . . . also, An Authentic Account of the Whole Insurrection, with Lists of the Whites Who Were Murdered ...,”in 1831,wrote, “Public curiosity has been on the stretch to understand the origin and progress of this dreadful conspiracy, and the mo- tives which influences its diabolical ac- tors.”What happened? Why did it hap- pen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again? After Reconstruction, Ida B. Wells, in “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” which appeared in 1892,turned the genre on its head,offer- ing a report on white mobs attacking black men,a litany of lynchings.“Some- body must show that the Afro-Amer- 24 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

ican race is more sinned against than the machinery of justice and, when taken with appointed to investigate race riots, sinning,and it seems to have fallen upon the greater inability of Negroes to pay fines in and, however sincerely their members me to do so,” Wells wrote in the book’s addition to or in lieu of terms in jail, produce might have been interested in struc- preface, after a mob burned the offices misleading statistics of Negro crime. tural change, none of the commissions of her newspaper,the Free Speech.White led to any.The point of a race-riot com- mob violence against black people and Very little came of the report. In 1935, mission, Lipsky and Olson argue, is for their homes and businesses was the far following riots in Harlem, yet another the government that appoints it to ap- more common variety of race riot, from hardworking commission weighed in: pear to be doing something, while ac- the first rising of the K.K.K., after the tually doing nothing. Civil War, through the second, in 1915. This sudden breach of the public order was And so the earliest twentieth-century the result of a highly emotional situation among The convulsions that led to the Kerner commissions charged with investigat- the colored people of Harlem, due in large part Commission began in Los Ange- ing “race riots” reported on the riots of to the nervous strain of years of unemployment les, in 1965. Between 1960 and 1964, the white mobs, beginning with the mas- and insecurity. To this must be added their deep nation enjoyed unrivalled prosperity,but sacre in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, sense of wrong through discrimination against in Watts, among the poorest neighbor- in which,following labor unrest,as many their employment in stores which live chiefly hoods of L.A., one in three men had no as three thousand white men roamed upon their purchases, discrimination against work. In Los Angeles, as Mike Davis the city, attacking, killing, and lynching them in the school system and by the police, and Jon Wiener write in a new book, black people, and burning their homes. and all the evils due to dreadful overcrowding, “Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Six- Wells wrote that as many as a hundred unfair rentals and inadequate institutional care. ties,” “the LAPD operated the nation’s and fifty men were killed, while police It is probable that their justifiable pent-up feel- most successful negative employment officers and National Guardsmen ei- ing, that they were and are the victims of gross scheme.” Police stopped black men for ther looked on or joined in.Similar riots injustice and prejudice, would sooner or later little or no reason, and, if they talked took place in 1919, in twenty-six cities, have brought about an explosion. back, they got arrested; left with an ar- and the governor of Illinois appointed rest record, they became unemployable. an interracial commission to investi- Who was to blame? gate. “This is a tribunal constituted to On August 11, 1965, a Wednesday, a get the facts and interpret them and to The blame belongs to a society that toler- motorcycle cop pulled over a car with find a way out,” he said. ates inadequate and often wretched housing, a driver and a passenger, two brothers, inadequate and inefficient schools and other Ronald and Marquette Frye, about a The Chicago Commission on Race public facilities, unemployment, unduly high block from their house,near 116th Street. Relations, composed of six whites and rents, the lack of recreation grounds, discrim- Their mother, Rena, all of five feet tall, six blacks, who engaged the work of as ination in industry and public utilities against came over. Marquette resisted hand- many as twenty-two whites and fifteen colored people, brutality and lack of courtesy cuffs—he would strike those fierce and blacks, heard nearly two hundred wit- of the police. ancient shackles. The motorcycle cop nesses, and, in 1922, published a seven- called for backup; twenty-six police ve- hundred-page report,with photographs, In Detroit in 1943, after a riot left hicles raced to the scene, sirens scream- maps, and color plates: “The Negro in twenty-five blacks and nine whites ing.“Does it take all these people to ar- Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and dead and led to the arrest of nearly rest three people?” an onlooker asked. a Race Riot.”It paid particular attention two thousand people, Michigan’s gov- When Rena Frye tried to stop the po- to racial antipathy: “Many white Amer- ernor appointed the commissioner of lice from beating her sons with billy icans, while technically recognizing Ne- police and the attorney general to a clubs, they pinned her to the hood of groes as citizens, cannot bring them- panel that concluded, without con- a patrol car and, after a crowd had gath- selves to feel that they should participate ducting much of an investigation, that ered, arrested another of her sons and in government as freely as other citi- responsibility for the riots lay with dragged away a woman in a strangle- zens.” Much of the report traces how black leaders, and defended the police, hold. “Goddam! They’d never treat a the Great Migration brought large num- whom many had blamed for the vio- white woman like that!”someone called bers of blacks from the Jim Crow South lence. A separate, independent com- out.The crowd protested,and grew,and to Chicago, where they faced discrimi- mission, led by Thurgood Marshall, protested, and grew. What came to be nation in housing and employment, and then chief counsel for the N.A.A.C.P., known as the Watts riot lasted for six persecution at the hands of local police conducted interviews, hired private de- days and spread across nearly fifty square and the criminal-justice system: tectives, and produced a report titled miles. On Friday night, a man said: “The Gestapo in Detroit.” The group The testimony of court officials before the called for a grand jury, arguing that I was standing in a phone booth watching. Commission and its investigations indicate that “much of the blood spilled in the De- A little kid came by carrying a lamp he had Negroes are more commonly arrested, sub- troit riot is on the hands of the De- taken out of a store. Maybe he was about twelve. jected to police identification, and convicted troit police department.” No further He was with his mother. I remember him than white offenders, that on similar evidence investigation took place, and no ma- saying: “Don’t run Mommy. They said we could they are generally held and convicted on more terial reforms were implemented. take the stuff because they’re going to burn serious charges, and that they are given lon- the store anyway.” Then, suddenly, about five ger sentences. . . . These practices and tenden- That’s what usually happens. In a police cars stopped. There were about 20 cops cies are not only unfair to Negroes, but weaken 1977 study, “Commission Politics: The in them and they all got out. One came up to Processing of Racial Crisis in Amer- ica,”Michael Lipsky and David J.Olson reported that, between 1917 and 1943, at least twenty-one commissions were THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 25

the booth I was standing in. The cop hit me in Vietnam that day,”an observer wrote. Paying attention, at that point, only on the leg with his club. “Get out of here, nig- On Sunday, fifteen police officers fired ever really took this form: the gover- ger,” he yelled at me. I got out of the booth. eleven shotgun rounds into Aubrey nor appointed a commission, this time Another cop ran up to the boy and hit him in Griffith, inside his own house, where headed by John A. McCone, a lavishly the head with the butt of a shotgun. The kid he and his wife had been in bed while wealthy and well-connected Califor- dropped like a stone. The lamp crashed on the their son, on leave from the Air Force, nia industrialist who, in 1961, had been sidewalk. I ran out of the phone booth and was watching TV. The officers banged made director of the C.I.A. by Pres- grabbed the cop by the arm. I was trying to on the door, and Griffith told his wife ident Kennedy but had resigned in stop him from beating the boy. Two cops to call the police. An inquest ruled his April, 1965, in part because he objected jumped on my back. Others struck the boy death—and every other death at the to Johnson’s reluctance to engage in a with their clubs. They beat that little kid’s face hands of the National Guard or the wider war in Vietnam. The McCone to a bloody pulp. His mother and some oth- police during the days of protest—a Commission report, titled “Violence ers took him away. That’s when I thought, justifiable homicide. in the City,” celebrated the City of white people are animals. Angels: “A Negro in Los Angeles has Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived on long been able to sit where he wants Johnson could barely speak about Tuesday. “All we want is jobs,” a man in a bus or a movie house, to shop what was happening in Watts. An said to him, at a community meeting where he wishes, to vote, and to use aide said, “He refused to look at the in Watts.“We get jobs, we don’t bother public facilities without discrimina- cable from Los Angeles describing nobody. We don’t get no jobs, we’ll tion. The opportunity to succeed is the situation. He refused to take the tear up Los Angeles, period.” Later, probably unequaled in any other major calls from the generals who were re- King recalled that one man told him, American city.” It called for the cre- questing government planes to fly in “We won!” King had replied, “What ation of fifty thousand new jobs, but, the National Guard. . . . We needed do you mean, ‘We won’? Thirty-some first, “attitudinal training.” It blamed decisions from him. But he simply people dead, all but two are Negroes. the riots on outside agitators and civil- wouldn’t respond.” You’ve destroyed your own. What do rights activists: “Although the Com- you mean,‘We won’?” The man said, mission received much thoughtful and The same Friday, the National “We made them pay attention to us.” constructive testimony from Negro Guard arrived. “More Americans died witnesses, we also heard statements fighting in Watts Saturday night than of the most extreme and emotional nature. For the most part our study fails to support—and indeed the ev- idence disproves—most of the state- ments made by the extremists.” Fun- damental to the McCone thesis was the claim that peaceful demonstra- tions produce violent riots, and should therefore be discouraged. In a devas- tating rebuttal, Bayard Rustin laid this argument to waste: It would be hard to frame a more insidi- ously equivocal statement of the Negro griev- ance concerning law enforcement during a pe- riod that included the release of the suspects in the murder of the three civil-rights work- ers in Mississippi, the failure to obtain con- victions against the suspected murderers of Medgar Evers and Mrs. Violet Liuzzo . . . and the police violence in Selma, Alabama. . . . And surely it would have been more to the point to mention that throughout the nation Negro demonstrations have almost invariably been non-violent, and that the major influence on the Negro community of the civil-rights movement has been the strategy of discipline and dignity. “Do you think you and Daddy might be brave enough By the summer of 1967, when pro- to sleep in your own bed tonight?” tests against police brutality had led to riots in Newark and Detroit, Johnson was facing a conservative backlash against his Great Society programs,

and especially against the Fair Hous- came a convenient way for presidents After Kerner got the call from John- ing Act, which was introduced in Con- to fill the gap between what they could son, he announced, “Tomorrow, I go gress in 1966. He’d also been trying to deliver and what was expected of to Washington to help organize this gain passage of a Rat Extermination them.” To his new commission, John- group of citizens for the saddest mis- Act, to get rid of urban infestations; son appointed a Noah’s Ark of com- sion that any of us in our careers have Republicans called it the Civil Rats missioners, two by two: two congress- been asked to pursue—why one Amer- Bill. Johnson had long since lost the men, one Republican, one Democrat; ican assaults another, why violence is right; now he was losing the left. By one business leader, one labor leader. inflicted on people of our cities, why April, King had come out against the Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the march to an ideal America has been war in Vietnam. Beleaguered and de- the N.A.A.C.P., was, with Edward interrupted by bloodshed and destruc- fensive, Johnson launched an “Opti- Brooke, a Republican mism Campaign,” in an effort to con- senator from Massachu- tion. We are being asked, vince the public that the U.S. was setts, one of two African- in a broad sense, to probe winning the war in Vietnam. George Americans. The commis- into the soul of America.” Romney, the Republican governor of sion included no political Michigan, who was expected to run radicals, no protesters, and Kerner wanted open against Johnson in 1968, asked for fed- no young people.The Pres- hearings. “My concern all eral troops to be sent to Detroit, which ident expected the com- the time about this com- would be the first time since F.D.R. mission to defend his leg- mission has been that at sent them in 1943. Johnson wavered. islative accomplishments the conclusion our greatest “I’m concerned about the charge that and agenda, and to endorse problem is going to be to we cannot kill enough people in Viet- his decision to send the educate the whites, rather nam so we go out and shoot civilians National Guard to Detroit. When he than the Negro,” he said. in Detroit,” he said. In the end, he de- called Fred Harris, the thirty-six-year- Kerner did not prevail on cided to authorize the troops, and to old Oklahoma senator, to discuss the this point. J. Edgar Hoover testified on blame Romney, announcing, on tele- appointment, he told Harris to remem- the first day, to say that the F.B.I. had vision, that there was “undisputed ev- ber that he was a “Johnson man.”Oth- found no evidence of a conspiracy be- idence that Governor Romney of Mich- erwise, Johnson said, “I’ll take out my hind the riots, and that he thought one igan and the local officials in Detroit pocket knife and cut your peter off.” good remedy for violence would be bet- have been unable to bring the situa- Nearly as soon as he convened the com- ter gun laws. “You have to license your tion under control.”Twenty-seven hun- mission,Johnson regretted it,and pulled dog,”he said. Why not your gun? Mar- dred Army paratroopers were deployed its funding. tin Luther King, Jr., told the commis- to Detroit, with Huey helicopters that sion, “People who are completely de- most Americans had seen only in TV Otto Kerner, born in Chicago in void of hope don’t riot.” coverage of the war in Vietnam. 1908, went to Brown and then Maybe the most painful testimony Northwestern, for law school, and, in came from Kenneth B. Clark, the Af- On July 27, 1967, Johnson gave a tele- the nineteen-thirties and into the Sec- rican-American psychologist, at the vised speech on “civil disorders,” an- ond World War, served in the Illinois City College of New York, whose re- nouncing his decision to form a na- National Guard, for twenty years, re- search on inequality had been pivotal tional commission to investigate race tiring in 1954 with the rank of major to the Supreme Court’s decision in riots. Protests had taken place, and general. Under his leadership, as Bill Brown v. Board of Education. He told turned violent, in more than a hundred Barnhart and Gene Schlickman re- the commission: and fifty cities that summer, and they port in their biography, the Illinois were being televised. Were they part guard had the nation’s highest per- I read that report . . . of the 1919 riot in of a conspiracy? Johnson suspected so, centage of African-Americans. A for- Chicago, and it is as if I were reading the re- even though his advisers told him that mer district attorney, later elected to port of the investigating committee on the he was wrong. “I don’t want to fore- a county judgeship, Kerner had a rep- Harlem riot of ’35, the report of the investi- close the conspiracy theory now,” he utation for strict personal integrity, gating committee on the Harlem riot of ’43, said. “Keep that door open.” earning him the nickname Mr. Clean. the report of the McCone Commission on the He was elected governor of Illinois in Watts riot. I must again in candor say to you Johnson loved Presidential commis- 1960, and it is possible that his coat- members of this Commission—it is a kind of sions: people called him, not affection- tails delivered the state to John F. Ken- Alice in Wonderland—with the same moving ately, “the great commissioner.” In the nedy, in one of the closest Presiden- picture re-shown over and over again, the same first decade after the Second World tial races in American history. He had analysis, the same recommendations, and the War, U.S. Presidents appointed an av- a strong record on civil rights, and was same inaction. erage of one and a half commissions a an adamant supporter of fair housing, year. Johnson appointed twenty. In declaring, in 1968, “Civil disorders will The historical trail is blood spilled in “Separate and Unequal: The Kerner still be the order of the day unless a deeply rutted road. Commission and the Unraveling of we create a society of equal justice.” American Liberalism”(2018),Steven M. John V.Lindsay,the handsome liberal Gillon observes that “commissions be- mayor of New York who served as the vice-chair of the commission, got most of the media attention.But Kerner did his work. When the commission THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 27

travelled, Kerner went out on the street erate a single American identity and a a million copies in the first two weeks to talk to people. He went for a walk single American community.” Every alone. Released in a paperback edi­ in Newark, and stopped to speak to a word of the report was read aloud, and tion by Bantam, it was said to be the group around the corner from Prince every word was unanimously agreed fastest­selling book since “Valley of Street. They told him they had three on.The final draft did include this pas­ the Dolls.” concerns: police brutality, unemploy­ sage: “Race prejudice has shaped our ment, and the lack of a relocation pro­ history decisively; it now threatens to Civil­rights activists, expecting a gram for displaced workers. One man affect our future. White racism is es­ whitewash, were stunned.“It’s the first told the Governor that he hadn’t had a sentially responsible for the explosive time whites have said, ‘We’re racists,’” job in eight years. mixture which has been accumulating the head of CORE declared. Republi­ in our cities since the end of World cans rejected it. “One of the major After months of hearings and meet­ War II.” In the final report, as the his­ weaknesses of the President’s commis­ ings, the commission began assem­ torian Julian Zelizer writes in an in­ sion is that it, in effect, blames every­ bling its report. Kerner wanted it to be troduction to a 2016 edition, “no insti­ body for the riots except the perpetra­ moving, and beautifully written. John tution received more scrutiny than the tors of the riots,” Nixon said from the Hersey was asked to write it, perhaps police.” That’s been true of every one campaign trail. “I think this talk . . . in the style of “Hiroshima”; Hersey of these reports since 1917. tends to divide people, to build a wall said no. (Instead, much of the report in between people.” Conservatives was drafted by the commission’s exec­ Johnson, when he got the report, deemed it absurd. “What caused the utive director, David Ginsburg, who was so mad that he refused to sign the riots,” William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote, later helped write Hubert Humphrey’s letters thanking the commissioners “isn’t segregation or poverty or frus­ campaign platform.) Toward the end for their service. “I’d be a hypocrite,” tration. What caused them is a psy­ of the commission’s deliberations, Roy he said. “Just file them . . . or get rid chological disorder which is tearing at Wilkins offered emotional personal of them.” the ethos of our society as a result of testimony that greatly informed a draft boredom, self­hatred, and the arrogant by Lindsay, describing “two societies, The Kerner Report was published contention that all our shortcomings one black, one white.” Another draft on March 1, 1968, but first it was are the result of other people’s aggres­ contained a passage that was later leaked (probably by Ginsburg) to the sions upon us.” stricken: “Past efforts have not carried Washington Post, which ran a story the commitment, will or resources with the headline “Chief Blame for Johnson came up with his own ex­ needed to eliminate the attitudes and Riots Put on White Racism.” It planation for what had happened in practices that have maintained racism became an overnight best­seller. It America during his Presidency: “I’ve as a major force in our society. Only sold more copies than the Warren moved the Negro from D+ to C­. He’s the dedication of every citizen can gen­ Commission report, three­quarters of still nowhere. He knows it. And that’s why he’s out in the streets. Hell, I’d be there, too.” In 1969, Harry McPher­ son, Johnson’s chief speechwriter, tried to explain what had so bothered John­ son about the Kerner Report. “It hurt his pride,” McPherson said, because it made it clear that Johnson had not, somehow, saved the Negro. But there was a bigger, sounder reason, he be­ lieved: “The only thing that held any hope for the Negro was the continu­ ation of the coalition between labor, Negroes, intellectuals, . . . big city bosses and political machines and some of the urban poor. . . . In other words, it required keeping the Polacks who work on the line at River Rouge in the ball park and supporting Walter Reuther and the government as they try to spend money on blacks.”Middle­ class whites didn’t give a damn, he thought, but blacks needed poor and working­class whites on their side. “Then a Presidential commission is formed and goes out and comes back, and what does it say? Who’s respon­ sible for the riots? ‘The other mem­

bers of the coalition.They did it.Those “It’s just not the same without the shame.” racists.’ And thereupon, the coalition says . . .‘we’ll go out and find ourselves •• a guy like George Wallace, or Rich- ard Nixon.’ ” That spring,Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed, and then Robert F. Ken- nedy. In July, five months after the re- lease of the report, Kerner wrote his own reflections, looking back at the re- sponse to the maelstrom that had fol- lowed King’s assassination, and argu- ing against the militarization of the police: “Armored vehicles, automatic weapons and armor-piercing machine guns are for use against an enemy, and not a lawbreaker. . . . If you come out with a show of force, you in a sense challenge the other side to meet you. Force begets force.” Still, Johnson fulfilled Kerner’s wish to be appointed to the federal bench. During Kerner’s confirmation hear- ings,he was questioned by Strom Thur- mond about the conclusions of the re- port that bore his name: Thurmond: Why do you say “white rac- that inmates have thought since the and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs ism” caused these riots? beginning of prisons: of Staff, and be photographed hold- ing a Bible. The next day, Ohio’s Re- Kerner: I beg your pardon. I wonder of what use is our prison system— publican senator, Rob Portman, called Thurmond: Why do you want to blame the as I have often wondered when I was seeking for a national commission on race re- white people . . . for this trouble? an alternative to this inhuman manner of re- lations. “It would not be a commis- Kerner: Because we say this has developed straining those who have violated the law. The sion to restate the problem but to focus over a period of time, and the people in the waste of man power—both by the restrainers on solutions and send a strong moral Negro ghettos indicated that the rebellion was and the one restrained. Removing the individ- message that America must live up to against the white establishment. . . . ual from the outside world really accomplishes the ideal that God created all of us as Thurmond: . . . What does that term mean? nothing of a positive nature. The restraint equal,” Portman said. He suggested What did you think it meant when you put it builds up frustrations and a smothering of the that it might be co-chaired by the for- in this report or approved of it? will. It kills motivation and completely re- mer Presidents Barack Obama and Kerner: I thought it meant this—that over moves decision ability. George W. Bush. a period of years the Negro was kept within a certain area economically and geographically With an ailing heart and what was The United States does not need and he was not allowed to come out of it. soon discovered to be lung cancer, one more commission, or one more re- Kerner was paroled after serving seven port. A strong moral message? That In 1971, Kerner became involved in months. He spent what time he had message is being delivered by protest- a scandal connected with his owner- left urging prison reform. He died in ers every day, on street after street after ship of stock in a racetrack; he was 1976. Not long before his death, asked street across the nation. Stop killing us. eventually charged and convicted of about the Kerner Report, he said,“The One day, these reports will lie archived, mail fraud. Sentenced to three years basis for the report, I think, is as valid forgotten, irrelevant. Meanwhile, they in prison, Kerner went to the Federal today as the day we sent it to the gov- pile up, an indictment, the stacked ev- Correctional Institution, a minimum- ernment printing office.” idence of inertia. In the summer of security prison in Fayette County, Ken- 1968, the civil-rights leader Whitney tucky, on July 29, 1974, two weeks before On June 1st, in Washington, D.C., Young published an essay titled “The Nixon resigned. He insisted that his police in riot gear cleared Lafa- Report That Died,” writing, “The re- conviction was one of Nixon’s “dirty yette Square of peaceful protesters, by port is still there, it still reads well, but tricks.” “I have reason to believe I was force. (“Take off the riot gear, I don’t practically nothing is being done to one of the victims of this overall plan,” see no riot here,” protesters chanted.) follow its recommendations.” It was as he wrote. He suspected Nixon of pun- The purpose was to allow President it had ever been. It is time for it to be ishing him for his role in Kennedy’s Trump to stride to St. John’s Church, something else.  victory in 1960. In his cell, Kerner kept accompanied by the Attorney General a journal. “So frequently I sit here alone,” he wrote, thinking thoughts THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 29

LETTER FROM MINNEAPOLIS THE UPRISING People who took to the streets for George Floyd are finding their lives—and their city—transformed. BY LUKE MOGELSON O n June 1st,a week after the kill- of the mural, among cardboard signs, officials and its communities of color, ing of George Floyd sparked a stood jugs of milk, which is used to al- though always plagued,deteriorated dra- national uprising that touched leviate the effects of tear gas. A couple matically in the five years before Floyd’s every state, convulsed major cities, acti- of nights earlier,the police had conducted death. In 2015, a white officer shot and vated the National Guard,and sent Pres- a raid at the site, clearing out people in killed a twenty-four-year-old unarmed ident Donald Trump into a secure bunker violation of a citywide curfew. African-American man, Jamar Clark, in underneath the White House, Terrence North Minneapolis. (Another officer on Floyd, George’s younger brother, visited Eventually,Terrence reached the curb the scene claimed that Clark had tried the intersection in South Minneapolis where two officers had pinned down to take his gun; witnesses said that Clark where his sibling had died. During the George’s back and legs and where a third was already in handcuffs.) Activists from previous seven days,Thirty-eighth Street officer, Derek Chauvin, had pressed his Black Lives Matter camped out in front and Chicago Avenue had become the knee into George’s neck for eight min- of a precinct house for eighteen days, in site of an uninterrupted public vigil, des- utes and forty-six seconds while George snow and frigid temperatures.One night, ignated by signs and banners as “sacred repeated “I can’t breathe” at least sixteen a white man opened fire on them,wound- ground.”Barricades around the four sur- times before his eyes closed and his pulse ing five. His trial, which ended with his rounding blocks impeded traffic and law stopped.Terrence sat down on the pave- conviction, revealed that he had a his- enforcement. The sidewalk outside the ment where someone had painted the tory of making racist comments. The Cup Foods grocery store—where an em- white silhouette of a prostrate body, its police forcibly tore down the encamp- ployee had called the police after sus- hands manacled behind its back and an- ment, evicting the protesters and arrest- pecting George Floyd of using a coun- gelic wings spreading from its shoulders. ing eight of them; in the end, no charges terfeit twenty-dollar bill—was buried Bowing his head,he let out an anguished were brought against the officer who under bouquets, mementos, and home- cry. He remained there for several min- killed Clark. made cards. Activists delivered speeches utes, then stood to address the crowd. between the gas pumps at a filling sta- A year later,in a suburb of Saint Paul, tion; messages in chalk—“fight back,” “I understand y’all upset,” he said, a thirty-two-year-old black man named “Stay Woke”—covered the street. Vol- using a megaphone. “But I doubt y’all Philando Castile was shot by a police- unteers passed out food and water; there half as upset as I am. So if I’m not over man during a traffic stop for a broken was barbecue, music, tailgating. A wide here wilding out—if I’m not over here tail-light, after stating that he was in ring of flowers and candles circumscribed blowing up stuff, if I’m not over here possession of a firearm. Castile’s girl- the intersection, delineating a kind of messing up my community—then what friend, Diamond Reynolds, and her magic circle. Later that day, within the are y’all doing? What are y’all doing?”He infant daughter were in the car. Reyn- circle, a group of indigenous women went on, “Let’s do this another way. olds live-streamed the immediate af- would perform the Jingle Dress Dance—a Let’s stop thinking that our voice don’t termath of the shooting on Facebook. healing ritual created by members of the matter, and vote. . . . That’s how we’re In the video, Castile, who was licensed Ojibwe tribe during the influenza pan- gonna hit ’em. . . . Let’s switch it up, to carry, sits at the wheel, blood spread- demic of 1918. y’all. . . . Do this peacefully. Please.” ing through his T-shirt, while Reyn- olds cries “Stay with me”and the officer Terrence Floyd, who lives in New Terrence fell silent. Or almost silent. continues to aim his gun through the York City, arrived with a security entou- The megaphone amplified his exhala- window. Castile died on film; Reynolds rage in the afternoon. As he approached tions. A reverend, standing at his side, was handcuffed and detained; the officer, the entrance to Cup Foods, guided by rubbed Terrence’s back,leaned over,and Jeronimo Yanez,was charged with man- supporters and swarmed by an interna- whispered in his ear, “Breathe. Breathe. slaughter but acquitted. tional mob of photographers and cam- Breathe. Breathe.” era crews, he paused to admire a vibrant In 2018,in North Minneapolis,Thur- mural: his brother’s face,set inside a giant The protests that have proliferated man Blevins, a black father of three, was sunflower. In the background were the across the country for the past two killed by two white officers.A body cam- names of more than two dozen other weeks have been both intimately specific era worn by one of them captured Blevins black victims of police violence, includ- and sweepingly ambitious, honoring a running away—apparently with a gun— ing Michael Brown,Breonna Taylor,Eric single human life while indicting a na- while calling over his shoulder, “Please, Garner, and Freddie Gray. At the base tional history. In Minneapolis, they have don’t shoot me! Leave me alone! Leave also been about a city. The relationship me alone!” Blevins was shot multiple between Minneapolis’s law-enforcement 30 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

Simone Hunter, nineteen: “It’s not just about George Floyd. It’s about all the unseen shit, where we don’t have the video.” PHOTOGRAPHS BY WIDLINE CADET THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 31

times.The county prosecutor found “no a law requiring officers to live within olis found that ninety per cent of them basis to issue criminal charges against the city limits was repealed, allowing resulted in no consequences. Chauvin, either officer.” suburbanites to join the force; now most the subject of at least seventeen com- officers are white, and few live in or plaints, was disciplined only once; an- Thirty-eighth and Chicago is on the come from the neighborhoods they po- other officer involved in Floyd’s death, Southside of Minneapolis. African- lice. (Chauvin lived in Oakdale, twenty Tou Thao, had at least six complaints Americans have been concentrated there miles from where he killed Floyd.) The filed against him, and was sued for po- and across town, on the Northside, ever black community makes up about a fifth lice brutality after he allegedly beat up since anti-black housing covenants, in of the city’s population; nevertheless, a black man who was in handcuffs. (The the early twentieth century, prohibited when officers there physically subdue city paid twenty-five thousand dollars to them from buying homes elsewhere in people—for instance, by hitting or Tas- settle the case.) The only Minneapolis the city. Subsequent infrastructure proj- ing them—sixty per cent of the time officer in recent memory to have been ects and redlining policies entrenched this the subjects are black. A 2015 investiga- sentenced to jail for killing someone is de-facto segregation,diverting resources tion by the American Civil Liberties Mohamed Noor, a black man, who shot from the Northside and the Southside Union found that black people in Min- Justine Damond, a white woman. while perpetuating poverty by inhibit- neapolis were nearly nine times more ing African-Americans from obtaining likely than whites to be arrested for low- City officials have cited the Minne- mortgages and business loans. At the level offenses such as trespassing or pub- apolis police union as an obstacle to ac- same time, predominantly white neigh- lic consumption of intoxicants. That countability.The union’s president,Lieu- borhoods have grown progressively more year, the city finally did away with or- tenant Bob Kroll,was named in the 2007 affluent.Today, Minneapolis appears on dinances against “lurking”and “spitting,” discrimination suit, which claimed that lists of the “best places to live” even as which had been disproportionately ap- he wore “a motorcycle jacket with a its racial disparities rank among the worst plied against black residents. In 2007, ‘White Power’badge sewn onto it.”Kroll in the country. The median annual in- five high-ranking black officers sued the has called Black Lives Matter a “terror- come of black residents in theTwin Cities department, alleging pervasive institu- ist organization”and has promoted train- is less than half that of whites, and, tional racism, including death threats, ing officers in “killology” instead of in though about seventy-five per cent of signed “KKK,” that were sent to every de-escalation techniques. “I’ve been in- white families own their homes, only black officer, through the departmental volved in three shootings myself,and not about a quarter of black families do.Un- mail system. The city settled the law- one of them has bothered me,” he said, employment is more than twice as high suit out of court. in April. “Maybe I’m different.” for black residents as it is for white res- idents. Patterns of bias have been accompa- Everyone I met who lived close to nied by a culture of impunity. An anal- Thirty-eighth and Chicago viewed the Many people in Minneapolis believe ysis by Reuters of nearly a decade of police as an alien force of constant men- that the police department both reflects officer-misconduct claims in Minneap- ace and harassment. A common objec- and enforces these inequalities. In 1999, tion was the default belligerence of officers—their tendency to initiate phys- ical confrontations, often under bogus pretexts.“The cops have written so many false reports on people just because they wanted to whup somebody’s ass,” one black resident told me. “It’s pure hate. Sometimes they don’t even take you to jail.They’ll take you to an alley and beat the hell out of you. It’s insane here, and people are sick of it.”Another local,who had grown up ten minutes away from the intersection, said that any infrac- tion, no matter how minor, risked in- citing police brutality: “The way they conduct themselves for very insignifi- cant situations is way,way beyond what’s necessary. At what point do the citizens of a community say ‘enough’?” “Make sure you can see how insignificant I am.” One of the people listening to Ter- rence Floyd speak was Simone Hunter, a short nineteen-year-old with red-rinsed hair; she lived on the Northside, but had become a fixture at Thirty-eighth and Chicago since George

Floyd was killed. Hunter told me that of raucous young people had congre- school a year ago, and had recently been the infamous cell-phone video of the gated in the street, with no law enforce- working at a Target distribution center, incident had filled her with anger and ment in sight, and the station was on in Woodbury, just outside Saint Paul. disgust.“I felt like I was going to throw fire. Smoke billowed from the ground From 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., she had stood at up,” she said. Until then, Hunter had floor,and people were roaming the hazy a conveyor belt, packaging merchandise never attended a large-scale protest, but second floor, tossing through the win- to be shipped to retail outlets such as two days after Floyd’s death, when peo- dows anything not bolted down: docu- this one. Though Hunter did not par- ple gathered outside the police station ments, folders, phones. A nearby post ticipate in any vandalism,it didn’t bother in Minneapolis’sThird Precinct—Chau- office was also ablaze. In the middle of her. In fact, she said, “it was very satis- vin’s precinct—she joined them. A the intersection, an upside- line of officers protected the building. down mail truck burned. A fying.” She viewed corpo- Hunter, whose small stature can ob- second mail truck suddenly rate capitalism as an inte- scure her pugnacity, pushed her way to appeared and crashed head- gral component of structural the front and furiously reproached them. on into the flaming steel. racism in America, and “How would you feel if this was done The driver jumped out, and working for Target had felt to your sons and daughters?” she said. people cheered. Cars spun as demoralizing as shopping One officer pepper-sprayed her, at close doughnuts, motorcycles there—a capitulation to the range; another whacked her leg with a popped wheelies, fireworks same rigged game whose wooden baton,knocking her down.(The and gunshots punctuated unfair rules were upheld by Minneapolis Police Department did the mayhem; a liquor store the police. But now every- not respond to requests for comment had been broken into, then thing had changed, and, for this article.) burned down, and alcohol circulated Hunter realized, her life among the crowd. People in ski masks would have to as well. She said to her- The next day, Hunter woke up with and bandannas wielded hammers and self, “There’s no way I can come out a large, dark bruise on her inner thigh. baseball bats. here and support this and be O.K. with Her whole body burned—“like some- burning shit down and also go to my one dipped me in VapoRub”—but she Later, when I asked Hunter what it job and be, like, ‘This is fine. I’m cool was eager to rejoin the protesters. had felt like to see the Third Precinct with accepting money from these peo- overrun, she answered, “Like fucking ple.’ No. I can’t be cool with that.” “It’s not just about George Floyd,” therapy. It was amazing. It felt like ‘Fi- The damage wasn’t limited to big- she told me. “It’s about all the unseen nally, we’re attacking them instead of box stores. Next to the Target, a char- shit, where we don’t have the video.” our own people. Finally, we’re not al- ter school looked as if a bulldozer had Hunter had been removed from a diffi- lowing ourselves to be threatened by plowed through it.Nearby,people hold- cult family situation when she was six, them.’ It felt like victory. Like, We can ing metal pipes stood outside an apart- separated from siblings, and raised in a do this.” ment building. When a carful of young foster home. She had felt buffeted by an people pulled up, eying a tobacco shop invisible, malign system her entire life, I’d arrived at the scene not long after on the ground floor,a thin,bearded man and, for her, the list of unseen shit was she did.The atmosphere was an electric in reading glasses and a colorful but- long. An unrelenting procession of en- combination of the rage that had com- ton-down shirt told them that there was counters with racism had confirmed her pelled people to battle the police and an nothing to steal.“We got children here!” station in a world that seemed organized astounded euphoria over having actu- he yelled, waving at the upper floors. against her. Recently, she said, the police ally prevailed. But there was also some- His name was Said Maye. He was a had stopped and combatively interro- thing peculiar: some people, many of long-haul truck driver and a refugee gated her and a friend, also a black teen- them white, seemed to be deriving an from Somalia.About seventy-five thou- ager, for driving with an air freshener inordinate amount of pleasure from the sand Somalis live in Minnesota, more hanging from the rearview mirror—tech- spectacle. A white guy wearing board than anywhere else in the country.Many nically a safety violation. “We’re used to shorts and Apple earbuds, walking a bi- of them,like Maye,resettled there in the it, but we shouldn’t be,” Hunter said. cycle, and sipping a bottle of malt liquor nineteen-nineties, during the Somali approached me to announce,in a slurred civil war. Maye said that more than a At around 9:30 p.m. on Thursday, voice, “They keep giving me booze!” At hundred families—some Somali,though May 28th, the night after Hunter had a strip mall opposite the station, looters not all—were living in Section 8 apart- been pepper-sprayed and beaten, Min- of all stripes had breached a Target, a ments above the retail spaces he was neapolis’s mayor,Jacob Frey,ordered the Cub Foods supermarket, and a Dollar guarding. His concern was that some- beleaguered officers defending the Third Tree. The Target had been nearly emp- one might set the shops on fire, imper- Precinct to evacuate.Frey later explained tied; water from ceiling-mounted sprin- illing the building’s tenants. Although that he had wanted to “prevent hand- klers rained down, and a fast-flowing Maye had taken his wife, his mother, to-hand combat.” The officers fled out stream carried debris into the parking and his three children to his brother’s the back of the station, on foot and in lot.Several teen-agers emerged from the house, outside the city, he’d resolved to a convoy of vehicles, while protesters entrance,their pant cuffs rolled up,nude protect his neighbors until the tumult hurled rocks at them. A few hours later, mannequins under their arms. had subsided. When I met him, at Hunter returned to the area and was stunned by what she found: thousands Hunter had graduated from high THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 33

“Everybody’s mad right now!” the man shouted, incredulous. “We’re sup- posed to be mad right now!” The vigil site became the hub of an organic, citywide mutual-aid campaign. Tully and Juan were convinced that most of the looters had come from around 2 a.m., he’d been fending off testing on behalf of ?” One of Tully’s outside Minneapolis for reasons having looters for fifteen hours. Another man friends,an immigrant from Mexico who nothing to do with the killing of George who’d volunteered to help said of Maye, asked to be identified only as Juan, Floyd. In the following days, politicians “I’ve watched him stand in front of peo- pointed at a corner building engulfed also seized on this idea. Minnesota’s ple pointing guns at his head. People in flames,in front of which a man posed governor,Tim Walz, a Democrat, spec- were waving guns in his face, and he for pictures.It had been a Latino-owned ulated,apparently without evidence,that didn’t move.” restaurant, and Juan’s mother had once eighty per cent of the people destroy- worked there. “These are not the real ing property and attacking law enforce- Maye turned up his palms and said, protesters,” Juan said. “These are op- ment were not residents of Minnesota. “I’m from Mogadishu—what do you portunists.”Down the sidewalk,a white Walz attributed the rioting to “ideolog- want from me?” woman in a tank top and cutoff jeans ical extremists” pursuing a campaign of used a fire extinguisher to smash the “international destabilization.” Trump, As the night wore on, the looters fo- window of a barbershop. for his part, blamed Antifa. In the city, cussed their attention on a block of small rumors spread of white-supremacist in- businesses up the road from the pre- A few minutes later, a car pulled filtrators hoping to delegitimize the pro- cinct house. Midori’s Floating World over next to us, and a black man got tests and white “accelerationists” at- Café had been trashed, and a group of out and started documenting the chaos tempting to instigate a race war. locals who knew the restaurant’s own- with his cell phone. When someone ers salvaged potted plants amid the rub- in a mask told him to stop filming, the Some people of this type do appear ble.“They didn’t deserve this,”William man wheeled around toward him: “This to have been present, and many looters Tully, a twenty-five-year-old outreach- is my hood—I live here! I live fuck- unquestionably were white. On June 8th, and-inclusion officer for the Demo- ing here!” the first arson charge for the Third Pre- cratic Party, said. “What is the point of cinct fire was filed in federal court— destroying the community you’re pro- “I live here, too! Why you mad?” against a twenty-three-year-old white man from Saint Paul. Of the demonstra- tors who have been arrested, however, none have been linked to anti-fascist groups, and few have been from out of state. Ascribing what happened in Min- neapolis to murky external forces elides the profound grievances of its black com- munity—grievances that, at least in the early days of the protests, were partly ex- pressed through rioting. A day after the Third Precinct fell, Leslie Redmond, the president of the Minneapolis branch of the N.A.A.C.P., declared, “What you’re witnessing in Minnesota is something that’s been a long time coming. I can’t tell you how many governors I’ve sat down with, how many mayors we’ve sat down with, and we’ve warned them that, if you keep murdering black people, this city will burn.” Chauvin was arrested, for third- degree murder, that same day. This ap- peased nobody. I was at Thirty-eighth and Chicago when the news was an- nounced, and the reaction among the mourners there was disappointment about the charge, and indignation that the other officers involved had seem- ingly escaped punishment.A new chant arose: “One down, three to go!” 34 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

At dusk, throngs of people filled the yelled. Another woman added, “Y’all Hunter’s sentiment was shared by street between the still smoking pre- need to fuck up the suburbs!”A middle- many of the protesters I met in Minne- cinct house and the gutted Target. State aged white man, wearing a motorcycle apolis. Although the vast majority of troopers and National Guard units had helmet with the face shield pulled down, them had not committed any crimes,they cordoned off the area that morning but ducked out of the store carrying bulk recognized the political utility of such had since inexplicably withdrawn. Sim- boxes of Advil and Tylenol. conduct. Nobody was killed, and neither one Hunter was back again. This time, law enforcement nor the military reported she’d brought supplies: saline and milk, The looting soon spread to an adja- sustaining any injuries during the riots. for treating tear gas; tampons and san- cent strip mall. For a surreal period, the Activists have argued that human life itary napkins, for packing flesh wounds. people gathered outside the precinct matters more than wealth and material The precautions felt prudent. Trump house chanted and gave speeches while objects, whose loss can never undermine had tweeted that the protesters were not fifty feet away other groups ran- the social compact as egregiously as the “THUGS,” threatened to deploy the sacked an Office Depot, a Kmart, and murder, by state agents, of black people. military to “get the job done right,”and a Dollar Tree.Several protesters pleaded, Property damage is therefore justifiable warned, “When the looting starts, the “Keep it peaceful!”Chantaveia Burnett, if it prevents such murders in the future. shooting starts.” one of the young women who had tried Whether or not you agree with that cal- to defend the Stop-N-Shop, had given culus, one thing seems indisputable: the Hunter was not alone in preparing up rebuking the looters, and resigned uprising in Minneapolis has already re- for the possibility of violence. Some herself to collecting loose bottles of water sulted in meaningful change. people arrived equipped with helmets, and stacking them in a neat pile. “Peo- goggles, and sheet metal; others wore ple are probably going to need water,” In addition to fixing the world’s at- plywood shields strapped onto their she explained. tention on the problems of police bru- forearms. A rusty van, marked with a tality and structural racism, the demon- cross of red tape, served as an ambu- By midnight,anyone looking to pro- strators in Minneapolis have succeeded lance—two teen-agers stood on its roof, test peacefully had left the scene. As a in winning a number of concrete con- making out. Near the station, in front helicopter idled overhead, people tak- cessions that likely would not have been of a burned Arby’s, ramparts had been ing cover behind a car wash launched made under normal circumstances.The built with tables from Midori’s Float- bottles, bricks, and large mortar fire- week after Floyd’s murder, Minnesota’s ing World Café. In the distance, the works at the officers on the roof of the attorney general upgraded Derek Chau- blue and red lights of squad cars flashed. precinct house.Others broke into a Wells vin’s charge to second-degree murder, The protesters faced them, crying out, Fargo bank. In a room with overturned and charged the other three officers with “Say his name—George Floyd!”When filing cabinets, smashed computers, and aiding and abetting him. Minneapolis’s the squad cars unexpectedly retreated, money-counting machines, two men, school board and its parks department exultation gripped the crowd. one white and one black, stood in front severed ties with the police. The Min- of a tall safe, arguing over a ring of keys nesota Department of Human Rights People began heading west on Lake that somebody had found. When it be- launched an investigation into the po- Street, a long boulevard leading to an- came clear that there was nothing in- lice force and moved to ban its officers other station, in the Fifth Precinct.The side to rob—or nothing left—a consen- from using choke holds and neck re- chants grew hostile: “Fuck the police!,” sus rose in volume and vehemence:“Burn straints. Most remarkably, on June 7th, “Who shuts shit down? We shut shit it down!” A black man vanished into nine of the thirteen members of the down!,” and “We want freedom, free- the bank carrying a red can of gasoline; City Council vowed to “begin the pro- dom! All these racist-ass pigs, we don’t when he reappeared, the can was gone. cess of ending the Minneapolis Police need ’em, need ’em!” Nevertheless, the Department.” Although the practical subsequent two-and-a-half-mile march “We don’t need money anymore!” import of this pledge remains vague, a was mostly celebratory. People piled someone shouted. radical overhaul of law enforcement in onto the hoods of slow-moving cars, Minneapolis appears assured. and residents waved from lawn chairs “We are the police now!” another on the sidewalk, as if watching a parade. added. After decades of civil petitions for a reckoning with systemic racism, what The mood changed when the crowd A teen-ager, wearing wraparound finally achieved it was the issuance of reached the station, as night was falling. sunglasses with the price tag attached, an ultimatum—one with teeth. As the Two perimeters made of concrete barri- stumbled past me. “Is this shit real?” he chant goes: no justice, no peace. ers topped with tall fencing surrounded muttered. “Am I fucking dreaming?” the building. Officers in helmets and gas Simone Hunter, like many protesters, masks stood on the roof,holding rubber- Ten minutes later, the flames leap- sees other positive consequences of bullet guns.The protesters pressed against ing from the bank were bright enough the upheaval in Minneapolis. She told the fence,taunting the officers.At a Stop- to throw into relief the officers still me that, though “there was always fric- N-Shop across the street, people with standing on the precinct roof. tion” among the city’s communities of crowbars had removed plywood cover- color—African-Americans,Native Amer- ing the entrance, and were hurrying out Simone Hunter watched the fire with icans,Latinos,various immigrant groups, with cigarettes and snacks. “This is not what was becoming a familiar mixture and refugees—“this has broken all that why we’re protesting!” a young woman of vindication and disbelief.“I can’t lie—I was happy,” she told me later. “If we need to make the world stop for peo- ple to pay attention to what’s going on? Then we’re gonna make the world stop.” THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 35

down.” Solidarity between the Somali- ready been struggling because of lock- usher the ankle-deep water out of the American and the African-American down measures related to COVID-19; building while men rescued desks and communities, in particular, has been gal- shops that hadn’t already been shuttered other furniture. Many of them were vanized by an urgent sense of common by the pandemic were now damaged, or evangelicals from Saint Paul.“We’re try- struggle that supersedes differences in covered in plywood. Nearly every busi- ing to help in any way we can,”one said, history and culture. Somali-American ness on Lake Street, the primary com- a little breathlessly. The oldest person women were ubiquitous at the protests. mercial corridor for Latinos and Native there was soaking wet and sweeping the On June 6th, when Ilhan Omar, the So- Americans, was closed. So were the bus water with visible urgency.When I asked mali-born U.S.congresswoman who rep- and light-rail lines, which meant that him if he was with the church, he said, resents Minneapolis, spoke at a demon- travelling outside the area to buy gro- “What church?,”and went on to explain stration in town, she acknowledged, “I ceries was impossible for those without that he was from Somalia. A safe-de- might not have been born in the United vehicles. At Thirty-eighth and Chicago, posit box in the flooded basement con- States. I might not have inherited the people had set up tables loaded with tained the passports and birth certifi- trauma and the tragedy that black Amer- canned and boxed goods, fresh produce, cates of his eleven children. icans have who come from enslaved an- diapers, toilet paper, kitchen supplies, cestry.” However, she said, the ordeal of homemade face masks, and other pro- Although there is a robust network racism had initiated her into the black- visions, all piled around signs that read of activists in Minneapolis, the American experience: “I have lived as a “FREE!” and “TAKE WHAT YOU NEED!” initial demonstrations there were im- black person in this country. I have lived Near Cup Foods, the headquarters of a provised and leaderless, reminiscent of as a mother raising black children.” labor-rights organization called Centro the Occupy movement in the U.S. and de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha had the gilets jaunes protests in France.Tony Nowhere has a sense of unity been been converted into a food pantry, its Williams, a member of Reclaim the more movingly on display than at offices swamped with donated items. A Block, a local advocacy group, told me, Thirty-eighth and Chicago. At once a line of people snaked out the door,below “This uprising is not the product of any site of solemn mourning and of festive the words “COMIDA GRATIS.” organizational strategy.”He added that commemoration, the intersection drew many local activists had not partici- more volunteers, artists, performers, Other spontaneous initiatives felt pated at all. Williams, who had been and activists every day.The police had, less revolutionary.The day after the ri- part of the eighteen-day sit-in follow- for the most part, stayed away: buses oting around the Fifth Precinct, hun- ing the killing of Jamar Clark, in 2015, and barriers sealed off a portion of the dreds of volunteers,most of them white, said that, after the five activists were neighborhood, which was patrolled by descended on the neighborhood to clean shot,“a lot of us who were there walked residents, some armed. A medical tent it up. Although some of them found away with a lot of trauma.” This time, was erected, and couches and lounge useful tasks—one group filled garbage rather than being physically on the chairs were arranged under the canopy cans with water at nearby homes, ground, Williams and his colleagues of the filling station opposite the Cup wheeled them to the smoldering ruins focussed on channelling the public’s in- Foods. A stage, a d.j. table, and an in- of a small business,and formed a bucket choate frustration into support for dustrial sound system were installed. line to douse the flames—others seemed specific reforms. A towering portrait of Floyd was primarily interested in being there, or mounted to a bus stop. Like an evolv- The absence of hierarchy, and the ing art installation, the intersection was having been there. Most of the people need for direction, thrust many previ- increasingly populated by statues and I spoke to said that they had come out ously disengaged citizens into public paintings. Visitors mingled, spoke, lis- “to support the community.” Yet it was and political life. On May 30th, while tened, danced, chanted, and prayed. not altogether clear whether sweeping the church members worked to salvage Fresh bouquets piled up on top of des- away the wreckage left behind by the what they could of the Wells Fargo, iccated ones.Pastors,priests,and imams protests amounted to an endorsement Governor Walz, having declared an 8 gave sermons. You could sense the un- or a censure of them. P.M. curfew in the Twin Cities the pre- precedented extent to which Floyd’s vious day, fully mobilized the Minne- death, compared with previous police This ambiguity was most palpable— sota National Guard—“an action that killings of African-Americans, had un- and uncomfortable—at the Wells Fargo, has never been taken,”he noted. At 7:55 settled white Americans. Soccer moms where a broken pipe spewed water into p.m., every cell phone in the city re- wept openly, old hippies burned sage, the scorched shell of the lobby. Dozens ceived an emergency alert: “Go home and white parents kneeled with their of young women used push brooms to or to safe inside location. Avoid the children before the spot where Floyd outdoors. The curfew is enforceable by was killed. Black parents brought their law.” When the message went out, I children as well, and it was impossible was sitting with Lisa Kargou, an im- not to consider how the respective con- migrant from Liberia, amid thousands versations would differ. of protesters in the intersection between the bank and the Fifth Precinct house. The vigil site also became the hub of I asked her if she planned to stay out an organic, citywide mutual-aid cam- past curfew, and she replied, “Hell yes. paign. Many poorer residents had al- 36 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

I’m out here. I’m in it for good.” Kar- “I hope you didn’t tip him for a cold pizza.” gou had three sons, ages twelve, ten, and four.“I’m fighting for my kids,”she •• said. “When they grow up to be men, I want them to be able to walk down assembling nearby: the crackdown would me,” he said. “And then this happened. the street without fear.” be violent, and the ensuing panic could And, all of a sudden, it all made sense. cause a stampede. The man proposed It wasn’t me. My city is hurting. My city People took turns talking through a that Griffin lead away as many protest- is depressed. My city is on fire.” public-address system, and most of the ers as he could. Griffin took the micro- speeches were more personal than po- phone and announced that a march was The manner in which law enforce- litical.If anyone was in charge,it seemed currently departing.A large group began ment has responded to the demon- to be an African-American man in a following him toward downtown. strations in Minneapolis has only in- long T-shirt with golden fringes, who tensified the resentment fuelling the had earlier scaled a street light and Not long after, a phalanx of state demonstrations. Although no police draped from it an enormous cloth tap- troopers in riot gear unleashed rubber officers are known to have been harmed estry bearing Floyd’s image. When the bullets, marking pellets, stun grenades, by protesters,many protesters have been emergency alert sent a ripple of appre- and tear gas on the remaining protest- injured by the police. One man, Soren hension through the crowd, the man ers—more than a thousand people, in- Stevenson, lost his left eye after being grabbed the microphone and implored cluding children and senior citizens, all hit with a rubber bullet. The rioting everyone to remain calm. “We gotta of them peaceful—then rushed them lasted only a few days; since then, ex- have some order, and we have to have with batons. Following behind the as- cept in a few isolated instances,the main decorum!” he said. sault was an armored tactical vehicle; crime that protesters have committed from its open hatch, a trooper aimed an in Minneapolis is being out past cur- Given this projection of authority, I assault rifle with a silencer at people. few. The day after Griffin led people assumed that he was an experienced ac- Within minutes, the intersection had away from the Fifth Precinct, hundreds tivist, or at least affiliated with an orga- been cleared. Disoriented and bleeding of peaceful demonstrators gathered nization. In fact, it was the first protest protesters, and some journalists, stag- downtown at the U.S. Bank Stadium. he had ever attended. His name was gered through the gas. Griffin’s wife, As eight o’clock approached,a man with Cornell Griffin, and he was thirty-nine who’d stayed behind, texted him, asking a bullhorn announced, “If anybody’s years old; he lived with his wife in Maple where he was, and he quickly headed confused or has questions about what’s Grove, northwest of the city. He’d back. Just outside the Fifth Precinct, he going on here, if you continue to stay worked as a mechanic, but for the past came upon a woman rooted to the in this area just know that they have year and a half he had been depressed ground, immobilized with fear. Griffin been ordered to shoot to kill us.” and living like a “recluse”—seldom leav- was attempting to get her to move when ing his basement and spending most of he spotted a nearby officer levelling a The warning set off arguments over his time reading the Bible and posts on gun at them.A rubber bullet hit his neck. its credibility—surely the police couldn’t Facebook. He hadn’t spoken to his ex- use lethal rounds on protesters? Then tended family in months,and,when the When I met up again with Griffin, again, hadn’t the President himself protests began in Minneapolis, he’d felt a few days later,his neck was still scabbed threatened such violence? Tony Clark, no more desire to take part than he had over where the round had broken the a twenty-eight-year-old construction after similar outrages.“I ain’t gonna lie,” flesh, and his voice was raspy from the worker from the Southside, had no he said. “When Trayvon Martin hap- trauma to his throat and vocal cords. doubt. “Did you not understand what pened, Freddie Gray, I didn’t do shit. But he was in high spirits. The protest Trump said?” he asked a group huddled Like, nothing.”When Floyd was killed, had shifted something into focus for around him.“He said,‘We’re at war now.’” Griffin’s best friend tried to persuade him. “For the last year, I’ve been feel- him to join the protests, and for the first ing like there’s something wrong with Clark had been a mainstay on the three days Griffin refused. Then, a few hours before I first saw him, he’d told himself, “Either I’m gonna live my life in fear, or I’m gonna try this one dang thing and see what comes of it.” After Griffin offered to climb the street light, the group running the P.A. system started handing him the microphone. He found his voice, and realized that people in the crowd were looking to him for guidance. After the emergency alert, a man on roller skates approached Griffin and told him that police officers,state troop- ers, and National Guard soldiers were THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 37

front lines—a vibrant presence, vocally protesters debated whether to violate Kevlar helmets, flak jackets, gas masks, and sartorially. That day, he had on a the curfew, they were joined by march- and assault rifles, paced the ranks. As a camouflage-print down vest, no shirt, ers who had walked from Thirty-eighth sense of alarm spread,the marcher who’d and his signature adornment: a quar- and Chicago, three miles away, led by a been singing to himself earlier raised ter-size earring gauge bearing the words group of California activists, including his voice and sang aloud: “ ’Cause ev- “NOT TODAY SATAN.” A cross was tat- Joe Collins, an African-American con- erywhere there’s a Chicago / The only tooed under his right eye, and a dia- gressional candidate from South Los way we’re getting out of here is if we mond under his left.The previous night, Angeles. Collins and his colleagues di- hit the lotto.” I’d walked alongside him as he’d driven rected the combined groups to follow slowly up Thirty-first Street, through a them toward Interstate 35, which had Simone Hunter walked up to a row neighborhood of wood-frame houses been closed to traffic.Clark stepped into of troopers and—just as she had out- with front porches and fenced-in lawns, the march, as did Simone Hunter. side the Third Precinct, when she was encouraging the protesters who had fled beaten and pepper-sprayed—boldly the Fifth Precinct.At times,he’d stopped The city was deserted, and eerily si- confronted them. I had trouble hear- his gray sedan and climbed onto its roof lent, and as the protesters filled a wide ing what she was saying: there was a to jeer at pursuing police officers. As four-lane avenue their chants resonated lot of racket, and after five days of tire- people had gathered around his car, he between sleek office towers and high- less demonstration Hunter’s voice was had told them, “I don’t give a fuck if end apartment buildings. At the front, almost gone. Still, it was obvious that you’re Vice Lord, P. Stone, Blood, Latin next to Collins, a marcher with a scarf she was using what little of it remained Kings. We all together.” Clark then tied around his face, his hat brim pulled to give the troopers hell.The organizer waved toward the police:“They the gang- low, and headphones in his ears nod- in the pin-striped suit did not appreci- sters. They the mob.” Later, he’d stuck a ded and privately sang along to The- ate this. “Ma’am, please, can you back megaphone out his window and held Dream:“I’m feeling real black right now, up?” he asked Hunter, to no avail. his phone to it while it played the video real black right now. . . .” “Ma’am, please. Please. Please. Please.” of Floyd’s death.“Y’all hear George cry- ing?” Clark had shouted. “This is why Reaching an on-ramp, the marchers Eventually, several other protesters we’re out here!” headed onto the empty interstate,where steered Hunter away. She was crying. they found themselves suddenly trapped: As she continued to talk, undeterred, Clark had known Floyd, and had in both directions, a few hundred feet people gathered around her, listening. looked up to him as a mentor—“my away, a wall of police obstructed the “My sister has kids who live here,” she big homie,” he called him. They had highway. People were clearly nervous, said of the city.“They walk up and down often talked to each other at El Nuevo but one of the organizers from Califor- these streets every day.This is our home. Rodeo, a club where Floyd had worked nia—a middle-aged man, anomalously This is our home right here.We have en- as a security guard. Clark told me that clad in a pin-striped suit with gold emies on all sides—not just on the streets. Floyd had urged him to be more in- cufflinks—assured everyone that as long I’m tired. I’m fucking tired. I’ve dealt volved in the neighborhood, and to as they remained peaceful no harm with racist shit my whole fucking life. more consciously exercise a positive in- would come to them.“You do not have I’m tired.” Then, clutching the front of fluence on its youth: “He used to tell to worry—we are not here for violence,” her sweatshirt, Hunter told the protest- me to use my voice—that’s what he al- he yelled. “They’re not gonna touch ers that she was wearing a stranger’s ways said. Having tattoos on my face, you. Trust me.” clothes and had spent the previous night people get the wrong impression.That’s in a stranger’s house—a white strang- what I loved about George. He told Clark shook his head, unconvinced. er’s. Later, she explained to me that she me,‘As soon as you start talking—that’s “It’s about to get dangerous,” he told had been walking through the neigh- when they’re gonna see you.’ People the man. “Y’all are playin’ with fire.” borhoods near the Fifth Precinct, after don’t know George.I needed those talks the protest there, when an S.U.V. pulled he gave me.” As the protesters linked arms, some- up alongside her. Inside were white men one handed out protective helmets from brandishing assault rifles. One of them Clark had seen Floyd being arrested a garbage bag.“No,”the man in the pin- shouted, “Go home!” Hunter sprinted from afar, without realizing who it was; striped suit said, snatching a helmet down alleys and side streets, eventually only later,when the video was published away. “We’re not here for that.” The encountering two white women. They online, did he learn what had happened officers, however, soon started advanc- invited Hunter to their place, where she to his friend.And the protests were per- ing toward the protesters, firing tear gas slept on an air mattress in their living sonal in an additional way: in 2016, and forcing them up a dirt embank- room.“I had never experienced anything Clark’s brother Travis died in a car crash ment leading to a Mobil gas station, like that before,” she said. “I was, like, after being pursued by police, south of where they regrouped, coughing and This is the kind of stuff that gives you Minneapolis. “I’m also doing this for gagging. “Everybody remain calm!” hope. It was just shocking.” him,”Clark told me.When I asked him Clark urged,his face dripping with milk. whether his brother would have demon- State troopers and sheriff ’s deputies, At the Mobil, she told the protest- strated, he said,“Travis would’ve led the with long batons, encircled the gas sta- ers, “Your neighbors got your back!” city.” tion; behind them, Joe Collins, the con- And, pointing at the troopers: “These gressional candidate, was on his knees people don’t got your back!” As Clark and the other remaining in a patch of tall grass, being detained. Troopers in camouflage uniforms, with Sometime later, the troopers and po- 38 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

lice began closing in,firing stun grenades Tony Clark, a friend of Floyd’s, said, “He used to tell me to use my voice.” and rubber bullets, even though we were already corralled, and no one had pre- curfew,the demonstrators were released A dispute led to a fight,which gained sented any threat. The deployment of early the next morning. The violation, a centripetal energy that pulled in more force provoked intense panic. Several a misdemeanor, is punishable by up to and more bystanders until dozens of protesters wept and screamed. I remem- a thousand-dollar fine or three months’ young people were involved, weapons ber feeling that the reaction was exces- imprisonment. Back home, Hunter were pulled out, and a dire outcome sive, and thinking to myself, “Come on, brought her citation outside, held a looked imminent. Then, as abruptly as they’re not going to kill us.”Later, while lighter to it, and watched it burn. it had started, it was over. A tall, im- reviewing photographs and videos that posing figure with a commanding voice I’d taken,I realized that many of the pro- Alittle after midnight,while Hunter appeared to have single-handedly testers who had stuck around up to this was still in jail, I swung by Thirty- stopped the brawl. When he ordered point were black, and that their experi- eighth and Chicago, where people were everyone to gather around him in the ence of the incident was not identical to still congregating.Tony Clark was there, intersection, nobody argued. mine. Deep down, I was not afraid of having slipped away from the protest the police; on an instinctive level, I un- moments before it was besieged.There He was Corey Moore, a forty-four- derstood that there was a limit to what was a palpable edge: after the past week, year-old North Carolina native who had they could do to me. If the legitimate residents were exhausted, their emo- moved to Minneapolis in 2000. A vet- fear that law-enforcement officers in- tions raw and their nerves frayed. A eran combat medic,he served in the Army stilled in black protesters was fundamen- global uprising had emanated from the for eight and a half years, until he was tally unknowable to me,so was the cour- intersection, but for many locals the honorably discharged, in 2013, after sus- age that people like Hunter had to stresses and pressures that had defined taining an injury in Iraq. Moore was no summon when standing up to them. their world before Floyd’s death were fan of the Minneapolis Police Depart- no less consuming than before. ment, and he later told me that Floyd’s As the officers converged on us, De- killing had been a tragic ending to ondre Moore, a twenty-five-year-old African-American from Houston— George Floyd’s home town—held his arms high and pleaded, “Don’t shoot! Let us leave!”A few minutes later,a rub- ber bullet struck Moore squarely in the chest. He fell to the ground, writhing in pain. “I thought it was a real bullet,” he later told me. The protesters were commanded to lie on their stomachs with their hands behind their backs— the same position as the silhouette painted on the pavement outside the Cup Foods. As National Guard units arrived in armored Humvees, the state troopers began zip-tying people by their wrists and leading them away.The pro- testers were surrounded by more than a hundred officers, troopers, deputies, and soldiers—almost all of whom were white. Hunter seemed less frightened than other protesters. Producing a Sharpie pen from her bag of supplies, she started writing the phone number of a local bail fund on people’s forearms. A young police officer, crouching be- hind his riot shield, trained his rub- ber-bullet gun on her and held it there. He looked terrified. Ultimately, around a hundred and fifty protesters were loaded onto buses and taken to jail. ( Journalists were not arrested, although state troopers punc- tured the tires of my rental car.) After being issued citations for breaking the THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 39

“It’s your standard ‘I’m not looking for anything count how he was made to get out of serious, but I’m open to sliding into a long-term relationship his vehicle, at gunpoint, even though he was in uniform, with his military or- as long as you never bring up marriage’ contract.” ders in hand and an Army duffelbag on the back seat. Nor did he explain how, •• after so many similar encounters, being stopped by the police scared him more an all-too-common scenario for black killed, Moore said, “This man’s life will than anything he’d experienced in Iraq— Northsiders and Southsiders: “His situ- not be in vain.This is going worldwide. especially when one of his four chil- ation went from zero to sixty, like that. The entire world is hearing us.” Scan- dren was in the car.Over there,he could That’s what it’s like for people out here, ning the faces of his rapt young audi- at least defend himself. if you get accused of anything.” But he ence, Moore continued, “Every O.G. also believed in peaceful protest. He had out here knows: we failed y’all. But it But Moore did try to crystallize for been at the Third Precinct house on the won’t happen another night. We got the white people who were at Thirty- first day of demonstrations, and had “got your back, come hell or high water. . . . eighth and Chicago what it felt like to into it”with a group of “Antifa-type peo- If you an O.G.,put your hand up!”Tony be black in America. He put it this way: ple” spitting at the police. When Moore Clark, who’d joined Moore inside the “It’s like you’re standing in this tight told an especially strident white man that circle, raised a fist in the air. When line that you can’t get out of. And ev- he “wasn’t helping our situation,” the Moore finished, Clark offered a prayer: erything that’s happening up ahead is man contemptuously asked Moore for “Lord Jesus, I pray that we can wake horrible as hell. And you know that his badge number. up and stand still with each other.” eventually you’re going to be next.” Now,with everyone at Thirty-eighth I left not long after this, but Moore The following afternoon, Terrence and Chicago sitting around the circle later told me that he and about twenty Floyd made his visit to the intersection, of candles and flowers, Moore paced in other people had sat there until dawn. sat by the painted silhouette, and asked front of them, dressing down those As the night deepened, people stood the protesters to “do this another way.” who’d been fighting. “That’s what they one at a time to express themselves and Although at that point the demonstra- want!” he shouted, like a drill sergeant. share their stories. “You started hear- tions in Minneapolis had already be- “I don’t give a fuck who bumps into ing individual voices,” Moore recalled. come peaceful, Terrence’s appeal, like you,who talks about your mama—that’s “It was awesome.” There were also in- Moore’s the night before, arrived pre- your brother! We are not gonna enter- terludes of silence. Squad cars period- cisely at the moment it was needed.The tain them with us acting like animals! ically approached the barricades, but mood in Minneapolis had shifted from We are not animals!” never crossed them. The intersection, one of fervid insurrection to fatigue—a Moore said, felt like an oasis. kind of dazed astonishment at all that “That’s what’s up, big bro!” some- had happened,and tentative uncertainty one yelled out. For the most part, he moderated and about what to do now. listened. He did not talk about the time, “I don’t know any of y’all’s names, in Alabama, when he was en route to If protesters on the ground were sud- but I swear on Jesus I will die for every a Basic Noncommissioned Officer denly unsure how to proceed, activ- last one of you!” Moore went on. “We Course and was pulled over by white ists and organizers, who until then had gonna do this the right way.” police officers, because he fit the de- been largely absent from the streets,were scription of a suspect. He did not re- not.Throughout the past few years,Min- “Keep that peace, big bro!” neapolis’s black-activist network had co- Pointing at the spot where Floyd was alesced around an overarching policy objective that, so far, had gained little traction: defunding and disbanding the city police department. Tony Williams, the Reclaim the Block member,said that many activists in Minneapolis came to promote this solution after seeing the ineffectiveness of reform measures— such as mandated body cameras for officers—that were adopted after the Jamar Clark and Philando Castile kill- ings. During the Obama Administra- tion, Minneapolis was one of six cities that participated in a progressive three- year federal program intended to “in- crease trust between communities and the criminal justice system,”and,in 2017, Medaria Arradondo, one of the Afri- 40 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

can-American officers who had sued the president of the council declared, “Our counter that Minneapolis is already department for racial discrimination a efforts at incremental reform have failed. dominated by violent, armed bad ac- decade earlier, was appointed chief of Period.” The historic decision has tors: the police. police.But Williams said that such steps launched the city of Minneapolis into had been “primarily about image rather uncharted territory, and it remains un- The day after Cornell Griffin was than about substance”; eventually,he and clear what, exactly, will happen if the de- shot in the neck with a rubber bul- his peers concluded that “this is really a partment is indeed dissolved. (Frey re- let, he went with his wife and several cycle, and the reforms that are a part of mains opposed.) “We’re all figuring it friends to theThird Precinct house,where the cycle don’t actually change the math out in real time,”Tony Williams, who is the protests in Minneapolis had begun. that leads to these killings in the first involved in discussions with the council, Huge slabs of concrete sealed the en- place.” He continued, “If we don’t want said. “There are a lot of questions. This trance to the partially incinerated sta- to just put a Band-Aid over the bullet has never been done before.” But, Wil- tion. People were boarding up the Tar- wound, we need to fundamentally reas- liams emphasized, “we can’t build a new get across the street and rolling white sess how to do public safety.” model from scratch without engaging paint over graffiti.In a corner of the park- with the community about what we want ing lot,Griffin and his friends constructed Until two weeks ago, the view that that to look like—that’s how we ended a small stage from two-by-fours and ply- no amount of reform could fix the po- up in this mess.” wood.A crowd gathered.Griffin mounted lice department—that its essential ar- the structure and recited a credo: “We’ve chitecture threatened people of color— Just how broadly the community decided we are not divided,because we’ve was little discussed outside of activist supports disbanding the police is, how- decided to take a stand. I don’t care who and academic circles.“But we’ve seen an ever, also unknown. Evidence is anec- you are, or your skin color, if you’re with enormous groundswell of support since dotal. There has been no referendum, or me today you’re my sister or my brother.” the murder of George Floyd,”Williams even recent polling. On the evening of said. As well-coördinated demonstra- June 7th,I was at Thirty-eighth and Chi- He’s been out there each day since. tions have supplanted the spontaneous cago,sitting with Tony Clark across from When people come, he asks them to re- uprising of late May, pointed calls to the Cup Foods,when reports of the coun- peat his refrain.Then they add their sig- disband the Minneapolis Police Depart- cil’s pledge appeared on my phone. Clark nature to the stage, which is now cov- ment have eclipsed less programmatic looked taken aback when I told him the ered with hundreds of names. “They’re and more emotional demands for jus- news. “Like, no police?” he said. It was held accountable from that point on,” tice. Notably, the majority of the people the first time he’d heard of the idea. Griffin told me. at “abolish the police” events have been white, and few of the front-line protest- Clark turned to his friend, a twenty- Tony Clark is considering travelling ers I spent time with attended them. seven-year-old named Lavish James, to other cities to tell protesters about what who’d grown up three blocks away.“Bro, took place in Minneapolis. He is worried On June 6th, Black Visions Collec- you want the cops to go home?” that the energy of the uprising is dissipat- tive, a group aligned with Reclaim the ing,and that the global attention it briefly Block, organized a march that ended in James had been among the protest- attracted has already drifted elsewhere. Northeast Minneapolis, outside Mayor ers arrested near the stadium,along with On June 12th, he told me,“I want to keep Frey’s apartment. Frey, a white, thirty- Hunter, and he was not shy about de- up the fight. I want to keep the fire burn- eight-year-old Democrat and a civil- nouncing the racism and abusiveness of ing. I feel like this was just Round One.” rights lawyer, emerged from his home and navigated the crowds to where Kan- the Minneapolis police.Yet he responded Several weeks have passed since Floyd dace Montgomery,the director of Black without hesitation: “No. If the cops go was killed. Simone Hunter still goes to Visions Collective, stood in the bed of home,we’re fucking turning into Hamas.” Thirty-eighth and Chicago every day.The a truck. If Frey had planned on deliv- intersection has become a second home ering an apologia, he was in for a sur- Corey Moore is of a similar mind. for her—or a first home. Recently, she prise. Looming over the mayor, Mont- Like James, he believes that violent, joined a volunteer security detail,and now gomery asked into her microphone,“Yes armed bad actors would inevitably dom- works nights,standing guard at one of the or no—will you commit to defunding inate and exploit any environment free barricades from evening until sunrise.She the Minneapolis Police Department?” of law enforcement. It’s not the insti- instantly took to the role,tossing out jour- tution that should be done away with, nalists and outside visitors after dark.One When, after some vacillation, Frey he said, but, rather, “the mentality that morning, at the end of her shift, I gave responded, “I do not support the full it’s us against them.” her a ride to her friend’s house.She looked abolition of the police department,” exhausted. Her voice was still raw from Montgomery yelled at him to “get the Williams and his fellow-activists chanting and yelling at police.Her fingers fuck out of here.” Frey walked away, were blistered from grabbing a tear-gas through a sea of middle fingers,shouted cannister and throwing it at state troopers. insults, and chants of “Shame!” “I’m so tired,” she said. The next day, nine members of the I asked her if she would be at the Minneapolis City Council—a veto-proof vigil site later. majority—announced their pledge to “Hell yeah,” Hunter said. “I’ll prob- dismantle the police department. The ably walk back in an hour or two.”  THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020 41

Outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, protesters lay down for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the amount of time that 42 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

PORTFOLIO WHOSE STREETS Marching through Philadelphia. PHOTOGRAPHS BY ISAAC SCOTT a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee on George Floyd’s neck. 43 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2020

I saac Scott is twenty-nine. Raised in Madison, Wisconsin, he moved to Philadelphia a couple of years ago to study ceramics at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, at Temple Univer- sity, where he worked long hours at a potter’s wheel. So, when the pandemic shut down the school and his studio, he was left without an artistic outlet. He started taking a camera with him every- where, walking all over the city, “trying to put down some images and ideas— for later,” he said. But after the murder of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, and the spread of demonstrations across the country, he took to marching among the marchers, particularly along the stretch from City Hall to the Philadelphia Mu- seum of Art. He and his camera stayed with the protests, from the early days of intense confrontation, of vandalism and police cars in flames, to the far more peaceful days that followed. “I was teargassed twice,”Scott said, as he took a morning break. “People were getting maced by the cops at point-blank range.” He is hardly an experienced con- flict journalist,and yet he would regularly get as close as he could to the front lines— and that meant being close to agitated police in riot gear. “I’m a six-foot-three black dude and I knew they’d have no is- sues beating me, and people like me, over the head,” he said, describing one partic- ular moment of confrontation and fear. “I could only see things like that if I was really up close and with people.That was the kind of thing I was there to capture.” In many cities, the effect of the demonstrations has shifted from the realm of the symbolic to the realm of policy. In Philadelphia, the removal of a bronze statue of the notoriously racist Frank Rizzo, who was the city’s mayor for most of the seventies, was followed by a raft of bills introduced in the city council to reform the police department. “The energy is there,and the city is finally respecting what’s happening,”Scott said. “Now I gotta get out there again.There’s more to come.” —David Remnick When police officers fired rubber bullets and tear gas into a crowd marching down

Interstate 676, protesters tried to escape over a nearby fence. “ Your whole face feels like it’s on fire,” Scott said.

A police car burned at an intersection in the center of Philadelphia. “I’ve been to plenty of protests in my life,” Scott said. “But

this one was completely different. The emotions were so raw.”

Experienced organizers have been joined on the streets by first-time protesters. On one hot day, a leader paused every thirty