The uprising sparked in Minneapolis by the police murder of George Floyd – which spread across the country and around the world – is building on and moving beyond the movements against racist policing that preceded it.
As community activists challenge officials to slash law enforcement budgets and force a serious national conversation about the utility of police departments and the prospect of disbanding them – we need to discuss the racist history that led us here.
Central to an honest assessment of that history is the extraction of wealth from the Black population, from the United States’ inception to the present. Protests toppling the statues of Confederate soldiers serve as reminders of the enslavement of generations of Black people at the founding of the country – alongside a war on the Indigenous population.
