On Monday night, Minneapolis witnessed a lynching. A white police officer murdered George Floyd, and the video left no doubt of what had happened.
It’s not the first time this had happened here, but something about this murder seems to be moving through the city in a different way. Maybe it’s because of a pandemic – a pandemic that has already activated structures of systemic racism in ways that attack black and brown bodies first. Maybe it’s because as the warmer weather arrives, we are returning to the usual racism against black people in public spaces. Maybe it’s because in so many ways right now our collective processes feel fraught. How can we mourn when our yearning to be close could carry infection? How do we grieve when we can’t physically reach for one another? How do we begin to tell a shared truth about the depth of violence at the core of our society, when we can’t even share space?
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