The militarised crackdown on protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has haunted the screens of a world under lockdown. President Donald Trump has been accused of trying to “bully social media companies and online platforms into changing how they moderate content online”. And across the planet people have responded, insisting that black lives matter.
The protests in the US came after the African-American community was already bearing the brunt of the coronavirus and the crackdown on rights that came with it. Ninety per cent of those arrested in New York under lock-down laws were people of colour. Black Americans are dying of the virus at three times the rate of white people. And, as we’ve reported in previous weeks, Native American communities have been among the hardest hit.
It’s not just the US. In Brazil, home of the world’s largest black population outside Africa, new data shows predominantly black areas have been hit disproportionately by the virus. The Chinese city of Guangzhou has a significant African population, many of whom report they have been vilified as a result of the virus: forced into quarantine despite testing negative and forcibly evicted by landlords who accuse them of spreading the virus.
