The contexts of the George Floyd lynching and the accelerators of protests against systemic racism
Abstract
After George Floyd’s death on May 15, 2020, the largest demonstrations (by number, duration, extension, and participation) in its modern history took place in the United States. The article examines the social mechanism [«Systemic (police) violence against African Americans»] that led to the lynching of Floyd and the one that led to that tsunami of protests [«Persistence in resistance»], the other «episodes» that acted as accelerators or reactivators of the protests (four «moments» of Donald Trump, the violence and militarization of the police response, other deaths of African Americans at the hands of the police, and the exoneration of the policemen who killed Breonna Taylor), and the contexts of different «duration» that are relevant to understanding those events: from structural «systemic racism», one of whose mechanisms of racial control is «systemic (police) violence against African Americans», to other «conjunctural» contexts such as the pandemic of the covid19, the social inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic, the radicalization and tension in political and social discourses in the framework of the electoral campaign in November 2020, and the existence of a movement like Black Lives Matter and its use of social networks as channels of mobilization. It also shows the interrelation between contexts and social mechanisms, and as if the first mechanism is incardinated with «systemic racism», the second feeds on the radicalization of discourses and the Black Lives Matter movement.Downloads
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