‘See the fire’: George Floyd and the effects of violent protest
After the killing of George Floyd by a white policeman in Minneapolis last Monday, Karen White cried.
“I cry for George Floyd because I cry for my sons,” the black middle-class Savannah mom said while marching peacefully along with 2,000 people on Sunday.
The killing of a black man by a policeman’s knee to the neck awoke something in Ms. White, by her own account. The old her would have been horrified by images of people looting and setting fires to protest police violence. But now, she says, such offenses against property seem apt in the face of systemic racism.
“If all 50 states have to see the fire in order for justice to prevail, then so be it,” says Ms. White.
As protests intensify from Washington, D.C., to Walnut Creek, California, the morality of protest violence is being debated in new ways in a
American reckoningViolence and attention
