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Don’t Celebrate White People Being Late to the Fight
Yes, this moment is different from other moments. What took you so long?
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
No one really knows why the world took to this moment over others. A popular theory is that after months of quarantine, people were eager to do almost anything in order to connect to something real. Another notion is that Floyd’s murder was captured so cleanly that it rose to some new level of violence; that, more than all the other videos of Black people being attacked by police, this one might actually be criminal.
This was a moment I knew, and not just from watching Eyes on the Prize every February. When the Rodney King tape hit the news, America was shocked, home-movie technology revealing what Black people knew all along. And we protested. The video was never going to be enough. When the four officers who brutalized him were acquitted, I sat on the living room floor of a girlfriend’s apartment — a girlfriend who was breaking up with me — watching Los Angeles burn through the night. And we protested.
This is not a moment without wins, which is part of what makes it seem so different. The decentralization of movement leadership is working. It…
