This article is part of a special section on George Floyd
and America, a year after his death. Read more about this project
in a note from deputy Opinion editor Patrick Healy in our Opinion Today newsletter.
On a humid, windless night several years ago, I was driving my parents’ S.U.V. through the oak-covered back streets of my hometown with four teenage friends. At an empty intersection, I reflexively began turning left before spotting the no-left-turn sign on the traffic light above. I jerked the wheel right, crossed the intersection and headed for the U-turn lane.
Before my friend riding shotgun could even finish joking about my driving, we were surrounded by two blaring cop cars that had been waiting in the shadows nearby. Two officers, their hands placed near the weapons on their right hips, ordered me to lower my window. I did so in a numb state of shock, knowing I was Black, we were underage and there were unopened beers and a bud or two of leftover marijuana in the ve
This piece was originally published in Momentum, an anti-racism blog officially powered by Medium. The public has now seen the troubling video of a Chicago police officer shooting and killing Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old Latino boy who lived in the city’s Little Village neighborhood. For Chicagoans, especially for those in Black and Brown communities, the shooting feels like another likely injustice in a long line of cases in which police have killed young Black people the police killing and subsequent cover-up of the death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald offers a high-profile example. But just seven days after the murder of the child, popular
On Tuesday, April 13, the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommended a pause in the use of Johnson & Johnson vaccine out of an abundance of caution. New York State will honor J&J appointments today and administer the first Pfizer does instead. As of April 12, 6.8m+ doses of the J&J vaccine have been administered in the U.S. The CDC and FDA are reviewing data involving six reported U.S. cases of a rare and severe type of blood clot in individuals after receiving the vaccine. An audio press conference on April 13 at 10 a.m. is open to the public on the FDA YouTube channel.
Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
But in 2020, after George Floyd died at the hands of police and wave of protests against police brutality spread across the US, police drove their vans into crowds of protesters, shot paint canisters at people standing on their own porches, fired rubber bullets at reporters and arrested other reporters live on television, and pulled down protesters’ masks to pepper spray them in the face in the midst of a respiratory pandemic.
There is a gap between the ways in which the police behave and the ways in which the public perceives them. And for a long time, police have behaved as though they think pop culture is responsible for that gap.