Police arrested more than 4,000 people over the weekend, as protests swept cities across the country. For many, the moment calls to mind history: the civil unrest of the 1960s and the protests after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968.
LBJ's Peniel Joseph, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, says these protests also signal a "generational opportunity" — to acknowledge and address racism and white supremacy within the country's institutions.
"But I think the larger context here is that people are so, so fed up with not just police brutality and the criminal justice system, but with really decades of neglect and disinvestment and brutality and dehumanization, [especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic] in predominately African American communities, Latinx communities, Native American reservations. So I think we're seeing really an outrage being expressed by people of all colors [and] one of the things that's most striking is the multiracial, multicultural, multigenerational nature of the protesters.”