A young woman leads a group of protesters in chants outside the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct on Wednesday evening. The death of George Floyd, after video surfaced of an officer kneeling on his neck, has prompted protests nationwide -- nowhere more heated than in Minneapolis.
Kerem Yucel / AFP via Getty Images
The death of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck as Floyd said repeatedly that he couldn’t breathe, has set off a wave of protests and outrage across the country. The anger has escalated into violence in Minneapolis and dozens of all cities across the country over what protestors see is ongoing police brutality against African-Americans.
It’s not just incidents of police involvement either. A black jogger in Georgia was shot and killed in a struggle with a white man, who armed himself after he and his father thought the jogger could be a suspect in a string of burglaries. A white woman called the police saying she was being threatened by an African-American man, who was bird watching in New York’s Central Park. The man he had nothing more than telling the woman to follow the park’s rules and put her dog on a leash.
These three recent incidents have raised questions about racism and why black men especially are often the victims of violence — sometimes at the hands of the police and in American society as a whole.
It’s the topic of our discussion on Monday’s Smart Talk.
Appearing on the program is Sandra Thompson – a York area attorney and president of the York County chapter of the NAACP. Ms. Thompson was one of five African-American women playing golf at a York County course last year when the owner called the police after a dispute over slow play arose. Also on the program are Rev. Dr. Frank Hairston-Allen, President of the Harrisburg Area NAACP, Chief Dean Esserman, National Police Foundation Senior Counselor, and Dr. Todd Mealy, founder of the Equity Institute for Race Conscious Pedagogy, and the author of Race Conscious Pedagogy: Disrupting Racism at Majority White Schools.
