One Big Difference About George Floyd Protests: Many White Faces
As crowds have surged through American cities to protest the killing of George Floyd, one of the striking differences from years past has been the sheer number of white people.
From Minneapolis to Washington, D.C., marchers noticed the change and wondered what it meant that so many white Americans were showing up for the cause of justice for black Americans.
“I was shocked to see so many white kids out here,” said Walter Wiggins, 67, as he sat near the heart of the protests in Washington last week. Wiggins, a retired federal worker, who is black, remembered attending the 1963 March on Washington and other civil rights events with his parents. “Back then it was just black folks.”
Why is this happening now? The nine-minute video of a white police officer refusing to remove his knee from Floyd’s neck has horrified Americans as attitudes on race were already changing, particularly among white liberals. Another driver is opposition to President Donald Trump, who has drawn large crowds of protesters since his election. Finally, there’s the coronavirus pandemic, which has left millions of Americans — including college students — cooped up at home, craving human contact. The result was hundreds of thousands of white Americans in the streets.
“This is utterly different from anything we’ve seen,” said Douglas McAdam, a Stanford sociologist who studies social movements, referring to the recent protests. Since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, every highly publicized death of an African American man while in police custody brought protests, he said, “but overwhelmingly in the black community.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/one-big-difference-george-floyd-140544805.html
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