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Graphic Truth: Five years on from George Floyd, pessimism sets in
Five years ago this Sunday, a white police officer was filmed killing George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis during an arrest. Video of the killing sparked protests, violence, and a racial reckoning in the United States and across the globe. Many segments of the public, especially on the left, clamored for institutional changes in the wake of Floyd’s murder — including an overhaul of US police departments — with the aim of addressing perceived systemic biases and advancing racial equality.
But since then, hopes for racial equality between Black and white Americans have waned. In January 2019, 65% of US adults believed that Black Americans would have equal rights with white people, per Pew Research Center polling. Today, that figure is 51%. The drop in optimism has been especially pronounced among white Americans, as the graphic shows.
A world of George Floyds, one year later
A year ago, the police murder of George Floyd galvanized a new generation of protest and advocacy for racial justice and police reform in the United States. But it also energized activists in other countries, who for decades had been waging their own fights for social and racial justice.
Here we take a look at three places where the Floyd rallies struck a chord — and ask: what's happened in the year since?
Brazil: When the George Floyd protests erupted in the US, many in Brazil were still reeling from the police shooting of a 14-year old Black child, João Pedro Matos Pinto, in Rio de Janeiro. He was merely the latest of thousands in recent years. Of the 9,000 Brazilians killed by police in the decade before 2020, three-quarters were Black. Impunity for police in these cases is the norm. And as in the US, the problems of racial inequality are much broader. Though 56 percent of Brazilians now identify as Black or biracial, economic and political power remains primarily with whites. And the pandemic — which continues to rage in Brazil — has taken an extra harsh toll on Brazilians of African descent
In the past year, there have been several positive steps. Last fall, electoral authorities ruled that political parties should give more funding to Black candidates, who are generally underrepresented in Brazil. And a historically high number of Black or biracial lawmakers took office in local elections last November. ( Interestingly, many had miraculously changed their race from white to Black ahead of the vote.) Some of Brazil's large companies made controversial moves to boost the number of Black employees specifically.
And yet, amid rising crime and killings in Brazil's cities, rightwing President Jair Bolsonaro has accused racial justice activists of "importing tensions" to Brazil and has a track record of encouraging police violence against suspects. Last November, fresh protests erupted after security guards in southern Brazil beat a Black man to death. And just weeks ago, a brutal, and potentially legally-questionable, police raid of a gang-infested favela in Rio de Janeiro left 28 people of color dead. In the days afterwards, protesters again decried the fate of so many Black Brazilians who die, they chanted, "by bullets, by hunger, or by COVID."
France: The Floyd protests also prompted a fresh reckoning with racial justice and police violence in France, where the case of Adama Traoré, a Malian-French man who died in police custody in 2016, remains an open wound for justice activists. According to the BBC, young men of African or Arab background are 20 times more likely to be stopped by French police than whites.
But in the year since, progress has been halting. For one thing, identifying the problem itself has been hard because France — as part of its idea of a race-blind republican citizenship —keeps very few statistics organized by race.
For another, although crime rates have stayed relatively low in France, a crime spike in 2019 and a spate of attacks by Islamic extremists created a sense of concern about both crime and France's national identity that rightwing politicians like Marine Le Pen have seized upon, forcing beleaguered centrist president Emmanuel Macron to tack rightward on security. Police unions have successfully blocked efforts to ban the chokehold that killed Traoré, and a new security law restricts the right of citizens to film on-duty police officers. Supporters of the measure say it protects law-abiding police from being subjected to online harassment, but critics say it makes it harder to hold bad cops accountable.
Australia: Some of the largest racial justice protests energized by those in the US took place in Australia, where thousands took to the streets to highlight the plight of the country's indigenous populations.
Although Indigenous Australians comprise just 3 percent of Australia's 25 million people, they account for nearly a third of all prison inmates, and a fifth of all deaths in jail. Hundreds have died in custody since the 1990s. Nearly a century after an Australian government program to strip Indigenous children from their families created a "Stolen Generation," Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities' health and education indicators lag, and bias against them remains widespread.
There has been some progress over the past year. Last July, the Australian government, working with Indigenous groups, expanded the scope of its "Closing the Gap" agreement, a policy framework that aims to redress generations of discrimination against Australia's Indigenous peoples. The new targets include a commitment to substantially reduce the number of Aboriginal people in prison by 2031.
But some critics say the targets aren't nearly ambitious enough. Others point out that many of the goals in an earlier agreement from 2008 remain unmet, and that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians aren't sufficiently involved in the policy decisions that affect their communities.
US global reputation a year after George Floyd's murder; EU sanctions against Belarus; Olympics outlook
Ian Bremmer shares his perspective on global politics on World In 60 Seconds (aka Around the World in 180 Seconds) with help from Moose the dog:
On the anniversary of George Floyd's murder, have race relations in the United States tarnished its reputation globally?
Sure it doesn't help. There's no question in the United States is one of the most racially divided and violent countries among advanced industrial democracies. And to the extent that the United States attempts to talk about human rights globally, it has a harder time doing that than other G7 countries would. And the Russians historically, and increasingly the Chinese, are trying to propagandize pretty hard by pointing out American hypocrisy. So I think it matters, but I would still argue that what the United States does internationally probably matters a lot more in terms of the way the US is perceived by those countries. So, no question it's important. And the legacy one year in, so far in the United States in terms of improving race relations, the state of that trajectory does not look great right now.
The EU levied sanctions against Belarus. Now what?
Well, the EU responded collectively and quickly, that we can definitely say, in terms of preventing Belarus' flag carrier from traveling to points in Europe, as well as stopping European airlines from flying through Belarus airspace, that's a good first move. They've said there'll be additional sanctions, let's see what they are. Let's see if they're significant, if they're against Belarusian oil or potash, where they make their real money. Let's see if they really hurt the economy, which would also have knock on effects for Russia, which exports a lot of energy into Belarus, they'd be unhappy about that. So we'll see. For the first 24 hours, I give the EU, the United States, the UK, all pretty strong marks for the way they've responded. But this is an unprecedented act of state criminality on the part of a very illegitimate Lukashenko, who should not be president, was not legitimately elected, and he's not going anywhere anytime soon. I want to see what next sanctions come from the Europeans. I also want to see the Putin meeting in Sochi with Lukashenko next week, very important.
Finally, with the US adding Japan to the, "do not travel list," what's the outlook on the Olympics?
Not great. Over 80% Of Japanese now say that they actually don't want the Olympics to go forward, that's a pretty staggering number. The Japanese prime minister says, "It's not up to me, it's the IOC. And the IOC has the decision. They say it has to go forward." Look, the prime minister has sovereignty, if he wants to cancel it, he can cancel it, though clearly there will be costs for the Japanese government, major economic costs, major political costs for the prime minister either way. It's really staggering to see just how much the Japanese have lagged every other advanced industrial democracy in terms of a vaccine rollout. And, and I still think there's a good chance they do end up canceling this, but it's going right down to the wire. And my heart goes out to everybody involved, the Japanese people, the athletes that have been prepping; this is not the kind of Olympics that you really want to be hosting.