SAY HIS NAME - BRITISH HERALD: JULY-AUGUST 2020 (VOLUME) by HERALD BRITISH

Author:HERALD, BRITISH [HERALD, BRITISH]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: British Herald
Published: 2020-07-19T16:00:00+00:00

White Americans turn out for Floyd protests, but will they work for change?

L

eslie Batson, a white office administrator from Maryland, joined the thousands of marchers protesting the killing of George Floyd in Washington, D.C.,

after her children asked why the family had done nothing about racism.

"This is my attempt to help elevate the voices of people of color, people who don't look like me and who don't benefit from the status quo," Batson, 42, said, as her 9- and 11-year-old children hid shyly behind her.

In recent days, white Americans have donned "Black Lives

Matter" shirts, carried homemade signs, and shouted "Hands up, Don't shoot" in cities and small towns across the United States. Sometimes they lay down in the streets, just as Floyd, an unarmed black man in handcuffs, lay face down and struggling to breathe as a white police officer knelt on his neck.

Books like "White Fragility"

and "The New Jim Crow" are topping US best-seller lists, and social media is flooded with #BlackLivesMatter posts. Fortune 500 companies and sports

franchises, predominantly run and owned by white Americans, voiced support and the New York Stock Exchange held its longest moment of silence ever for Floyd.

The United States has a long history of white participation in civil rights protests, but the current outpouring of support is unprecedented, historians and social scientists agree.

That said, many question white Americans' long-term commitment to do the work to fight racism.

"Historically, when we see higher levels of participation from white folks in movements and moments like this,

that participation falls off

precipitously after we move away from the protest," said Charles McKinney, associate history professor and chair of Africana Studies at Rhodes College in Tennessee.

After civil rights activists leading protest marches in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 were beaten bloody by police, twice as many Americans polled expressed sympathy with protesters than with the state of Alabama, Pew Research noted.

In a separate opinion poll at the same time, however, 45% believed the US administration of President Lyndon Johnson was moving too fast on the voting rights and integration that protesters advocated.

McKinney is analysing whether the high white protester turnout will translate into laws that aid the Black Lives Matter movement.

"In order for this to be the last racial inflection point... white America must end its sideline sympathy and assume full

ownership of this problem," said Allyn Brooks LaSure, a former US diplomat, and executive vicepresident for communications at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a national coalition of civil and human rights groups.

That would include awkward conversations on family Zoom calls, in work conference rooms, and at Thanksgiving dinners, he recommends.

facebook.com/britishherald

July-August 2020 45

Real Change or Talk?

Big companies around the world which have typically stayed away from this debate have pledged over $1.7 billion to advance racial justice and equity. City councils are voting to cut police funding and limit police tactics, and statues to the slave-holding supporters in the US Civil war are coming down.

Some of the same US companies have elevated few African

Americans to top jobs; two

centuries after it started,

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