How the coronavirus, record unemployment, and years of African American deaths in police custody exploded into the biggest protests in 50 years
- The nation has erupted in protest over the death of George Floyd, the 46-year-old black man who died while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 25.
- While experts point to existing societal inequalities faced by black Americans as a catalyst behind the intense fallout from Floyd's death, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, current economic uncertainty, and their unique impact on communities of color further exacerbated the pain and tension behind this moment.
- "It is people seeing their friends and family dying from things that are preventable — things that others dying from — and it's all coming up in this moment where they're seeing George Floyd die in a way he didn't have to," Dr. Jason Nichols, a professor of African American studies at the University of Maryland, told Insider.
Over the past week, protests have erupted in nearly every corner of the US after the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes as he begged to be released, said he couldn't breathe, and eventually lost consciousness.
At least three other officers stood watch, though only one officer — Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd — has faced criminal charges: third-degree murder and manslaughter. Chauvin and all of the involved officers were fired from the Minneapolis Police Department.
It was not the first time the nation has grappled with the death of a black American at the hands of law enforcement, especially when caught on video. But Floyd's final moments, during which he could be heard saying, "I can't breathe," unearthed a unique outrage, even prompting solidarity protests around the globe.
"It wasn't the first time we've heard that and it wasn't the first time we heard those exact words he uttered," Dr. Jason Nichols, a professor of American American studies at the University of Maryland, said of the rallying cry adopted by activists after the 2014 death of Eric Garner, who also uttered the words before he died when a New York City police officer placed him in an illegal chokehold.
"But I think for the first time to watch a man who appeared helpless, bound, and to see a knee on the man's neck," Nichols told Insider.
Floyd and Garner are just two of a growing list of black men and women whose deaths at the hands of various US police forces. Police officers killed 1,099 people in 2019 alone, according to the Mapping Police Violence project. About a quarter of those killed were Black people despite African Americans making up just 13% of the US population.
Some of these deaths have led to community outcry and days-long demonstrations that gripped the nation like in 2014 when Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man, was shot and killed in broad daylight by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The protests, similar to those following Floyd's death, left Missouri in a persistent state of unrest, prompting the governor to declare a state of emergency, activate the National Guard, and set a curfew as police violently clashed with protestors.
But Floyd's death also came at a when, amid a global health pandemic, black communities made calls for justice for other lives lost: 12 days before Floyd died, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African-American emergency room technician who was killed by Louisville police on March 13 after they executed a no-knock warrant at her apartment. Police shot her eight times. Less than three weeks before that, in Brunswick, Georgia, Ahmaud Arbery was gunned down while he was jogging. It took two months for local authorities to charge three white men involved in his killing, which occurred only after a defense attorney leaked the graphic video of Arbery's murder.
"I think it is people seeing their friends and family dying from things that are preventable — things that others are dying from — and it's all coming up in this moment where they're seeing George Floyd die in a way he didn't have to," Nichols said, noting that Floyd, Taylor and Arbery, among others, are "martyrs and symbols.
"But they're not the entire cause — they may just be the straw that broke the camel's back."
Protests are partially fueled by frustrations related to the COVID-19 pandemic
The coronavirus pandemic has "led to a lot of frustration," Nichols said, due to the fact black people "are seeing their families, their friends, their loved ones dying," unnecessarily.
In addition to stewing tensions felt by the Black community after years of unchecked police brutality, Nichols also pointed toward racial disparities in policing and health care during the COVID-19 crisis as catalysts behind the current nationwide protests, which have seen violent clashes between police and protesters, fatalities, and property destruction.
Data from the New York Police Department showed that police officers issued some 374 summons "for violations of emergency procedures and acts liable to spread disease" between March 16 and May 5 — as New Yorkers had been asked to stay home and prohibited from group gatherings in order to stem the COVID-19 outbreak, which hit New York harder than any other US state. Of those summonses, 304 were given to black and Hispanic New Yorkers, according to Time.
The Brooklyn District Attorney's office told Time that 40 people were arrested between March 17 and May 4 for violating social distancing measures. Of those arrested, 35 were black, four were Hispanic, and just one was white, according to the report.
The ongoing pandemic not only exposed disparities in policing practices but exposed how disparities in health care as the disease disproportionately infected and killed African Americans and other people of color in the US.
A report published in May found that US counties with a population of 13% African American or higher accounted for 58% of COVID-19 deaths and 52% of cases nationwide.
In New York City, for example, COVID-19 caused a higher rate of infection and death in the lower-populated Bronx neighborhood than in Manhattan, according to a previous Business Insider report. The Bronx's population is 85% black or Hispanic, where the majority — 64% — of residents in Manhattan are white.
Black patients have accounted for 28% of deaths in New York City while comprising about 22% of the entire population. Hispanic patients make up 30% of deaths and about 29% of the population. White patients make up 25% of deaths, compared with 32% of the population, according to the report.
In Georgia, the overwhelming majority — 83% — of COVID-19 patients that ended up in the hospital were African American. Just 32% of Georgia's population is black.
Experts, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have said the disproportionate impact is not because Black Americans are more susceptible COVID-19, but is due to the black community's higher rate of underlying conditions — like asthma, hypertension, and obesity — that trigger more aggressive cases of the disease.
"We've seen how COVID-19 has affected African Americans, but again, it is the health disparities and the healthcare disparities that have existed for generations that only needed something like COVID-19 to come in and wipe people out," Nichols told Insider.
Nationwide economic uncertainty and inequality also added to brewing frustrations
The protests have also come amid a period of economic uncertainty ushered in by COVID-19, as states ordered non-essential businesses to close, companies laid off employees, and Americans faced a recession. More than 40 million people have filed for unemployment benefits since the pandemic reached the US — an all-time high.
"It's not just about police violence," Mehrsa Baradaran, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, told The Hill. "It's about a whole bunch of things that people just maybe don't pay attention to along the way and a lot of that is stemmed from the economic impact of discrimination affecting these communities over time."
In the month of April, unemployment among Hispanics in the US surged to an all-time high of 18.9%, while unemployment in the black community rose to 16.7% compared to the 14.2% unemployment rate among white Americans.
As Business Insider previously noted, the gap between the unemployment rate of white and black Americans shrunk amid the COVID-19 pandemic — the figure is typically twice as high among black Americans. That's likely because black workers made up a larger percentage of essential workers, which also raised their risk of contracting COVID-19.
The cycle of social inequities and police brutality faced by African Americans that led to the country's current state of mass outrage, would only stop with a "revolution of values," once called for by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nichols said.
"A true revolution of values," King had argued in 1967, during America's civil rights movement, "will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies."
Until then, unrest like those following George Floyd's death "is going to happen over and over again," Nichols said.
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Photos show how the Black Lives Matter protests compare to civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s