On Wednesday, in the midst of nationwide protests triggered by the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) accused Democrats of having failed to take up police reform during President Barack Obama’s administration.

“I’m getting a little tired of being lectured to by my Democratic colleagues, that all of this is Trump’s fault,” he told reporters at a press conference announcing a Republican police reform package. “You had eight years!” 

President Donald Trump expressed the same sentiment on Tuesday, when he signed an executive order focused on police misconduct. “President Obama and Vice President Biden never even tried to fix this,” Trump said. “The reason they didn’t try is because they had no idea how.”

In fact, the Obama administration and Democrats—as well as some Republicans—did embrace some criminal justice reform efforts in those years. After the high-profile deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Freddy Gray in Baltimore, Obama’s administration took steps to tackle police brutality; both those cities are now under court-monitored police reform agreements negotiated by his Justice Department. And while there was bipartisan support in Congress during Obama’s presidency for some police reforms, Republican legislators ultimately blocked the efforts in the final months of his administration, partly, as the New York Times reported, to deny him a “legacy victory.” Today, they deny that he even attempted it.

In 2015, Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin and Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia unveiled a criminal justice reform plan that included incentives to adopt body cameras and provide de-escalation training. While a much more modest proposal from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) that lacked reforms targeting police moved forward, in 2016, as Trump ascended with the help of tough-on-crime rhetoric, Republicans backed away.

Another bipartisan criminal justice bill presented in the fall of 2016 would have kept juveniles out of adult prisons. The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, which provided funding for gang-intervention programs alongside a ban on shackling pregnant girls, passed the House of Representatives with a massive bipartisan majority. But in the Senate, Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton, who recently advocated deploying military troops to violently suppress the protests, blocked it.

In 2018, under Trump, the bill finally passed, but only with a concession extracted by Cotton that judges could lock up juveniles for offenses like truancy if they violated a court order. (His home state of Arkansas does this a lot.) Just three days later, Congress passed the First Step Act, a sentencing reform law. Even as the bill permitted a few thousand inmates to leave prison, the Trump Justice Department worked to undermine the legislation and keep as many people locked up as possible.

By comparison, under Obama, the Justice Department was where the administration’s most important progress on police reform took place. As Mother Jones reported in 2017, Obama’s Justice Department “began to aggressively enforce a 1994 law that grants it the power to probe local police departments accused of racial bias, excessive force, and other civil rights violations. Its investigations led to 15 reform agreements in large cities as well as smaller communities.”

When Jeff Sessions became attorney general in 2017, Trump’s Justice Department ceased attempts to investigate police departments and shifted its focus to rounding up and prosecuting people. Sessions required prosecutors to seek the harshest sentences possible, erasing progress toward more moderate punishments and reverting to the sorts of lengthy incarcerations that destroyed many Black and poor communities in the 1980s and 1990s. Before Trump fired him, Sessions made sure to issue guidance making the department’s de facto end to consent decrees official policy, signaling that police departments would no longer be burdened by federal oversight. Meanwhile, Trump cozied up to police unions and spoke openly about his support for excessive force. In 2017, Trump told a group officers on Long Island to go ahead and rough up suspects. The message sent, through both words and policies, was clear: The administration was not concerned with police brutality—it even invited it.

That message was received. When the head of the Minneapolis police union got on stage at a Trump rally last year, he thanked the president for unwinding police reform efforts. Trump “got rid of the Holder-Loretta Lynch regime and decided to start letting the cops do their job, put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us,” Bob Kroll said just a few months before protests would prompt the Minneapolis City Council to begin efforts to dismantle his police department.

There are plenty of valid criticisms of Obama’s criminal justice legacy, including many lodged by activists now demonstrating in the street. It’s clear that the consent decrees his administration fought for didn’t end police brutality. And 2015 and 2016’s bipartisan attempts at reform of look meager compared to what Black Lives Matter and other activists now call for: a wholesale rethinking of law enforcement in the United States and drastically reducing the role of police.  

There’s a reason today’s protesters are wary of embracing Democrats: the brutality against Black people does not abate during Democratic administrations or under Democratic reforms. While Obama fought to advance this cause, he did not champion it as aggressively as he did others.

The narrative pushed by Lindsay Graham and others that Obama and Democrats did nothing for eight years is not true. But today, it’s easier to make this false claim because Republicans either blocked their attempts, or have since dismantled their accomplishments.

Britain’s foreign secretary Dominic Raab, who unexpectedly stepped in for Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson after he contracted the coronavirus, is in the limelight once again. This time, he’s taking a different page from Johnson’s leadership—one that’s rife with discriminatory and racist statements.

“I’ve got say on this take-the-knee thing, which I don’t know, maybe it’s got a broader history, but it seems to be taken from the Game of Thrones, feels to me like a symbol of subjugation and subordination, rather than one of liberation and emancipation,” Raab said in an interview with Talk Radio Thursday morning. “But I understand people feel differently about it, so it’s a matter of personal choice.”

Raab’s assertion, while confident, is wrong. The act of taking one knee was started by Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, to protest systemic racism in America. The powerful gesture, which sparked years of debate since Kaepernick’s first kneel during the national anthem in 2016, has been widely used throughout the current police brutality protests. (Other athletes had similarly refused to stand during the national anthem over the years.)

Raab’s extraordinarily dismissive tone continued when he was asked if he would ever adopt the pose to demonstrate solidarity with the protests. “I’d take the knee for two people: the Queen and the Mrs. when I asked her to marry me,” he responded, prompting a boisterous laugh from interviewer Julia Hartley-Brewer.

Asked if he would take a knee in support of Black Lives Matter, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab: "I take the knee for two people; the Queen and the Mrs when I asked her to marry me." Listen live ► https://t.co/sv3MZUm41c@JuliaHB1 | @DominicRaab pic.twitter.com/HbCIrCFKKV

— talkRADIO (@talkRADIO) June 18, 2020

The comments from Raab, a key figure in ongoing Brexit negotiations, attracted praise from the country’s far-right set, with Britain’s official Leave campaign calling them “refreshing” amid the backdrop of global protests against police brutality.

Refreshing to see the foreign secretary Dominic Raab speaking sense on taking the knee – "I take the knee for two people: the Queen, and my missus when I asked her to marry me!" Brilliant!

— Leave.EU (@LeaveEUOfficial) June 18, 2020

Raab is the latest member of Johnson’s cabinet to stir controversy with a take on the Black Lives Matter protests that exploded in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by police in Minneapolis. As the demonstrations have gone global, with thousands marching across the United Kingdom in recent weeks, Johnson has claimed that protesters are engaged in a sense of “victimization,” while denying that Britain is a racist country.

Garrett Rolfe—the former Atlanta police officer who shot and killed Rayshard Brooks last week, kicking him after as he lay on the ground—was charged with felony murder, the Fulton County district attorney announced Wednesday. The shooting already led to the firing of Rolfe and the resignation of Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields.

As Mother Jones reported last week:

The encounter began Friday night when officers found that Rayshard Brooks, 27, had fallen asleep in his car at a Wendy’s drive-through, causing other customers to drive around him, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations. Police gave Brooks a sobriety test. After he failed, the two officers tried take him into custody, but he “resisted and a struggle ensued.” 

An eyewitness video posted on social media overnight shows cops trying to pin Brooks on the ground, one of them with his taser drawn. Brooks grabs the taser and runs away with it, off camera, after which gunshots can be heard. On Saturday evening, the GBI released a surveillance video in which Brooks can be seen running away. He turns as he runs and aims the taser at one of the officers, at which point the cop shoots him with his gun.

According to the DA, video evidence shows Rolfe saying “I got him,” after shooting Brooks. Rolfe faces 10 other charges, including aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and failure to render timely medical attention.

Devin Brosnan, the officer on duty with Rolfe that night, faces three charges, including aggravated assault. The video shows Brosnan standing on Brooks’ shoulders as he lay dying.

Brosnan is currently on administrative leave. Rolfe has already been fired from the police force, and now faces charges that, if convicted, could lead to the death penalty. 

After spending the last decade covering America’s criminal justice system, one thing is clear to activist, journalist, and lawyer Josie Duffy Rice: a grab-bag approach to incremental policy reform isn’t going to fix all the problems with American policing. The kind of radical changes to policing that the United States needs to build safer communities and protect Black Americans? That will take a wholesale reimagining of public resources—root, and branch.

As the president of The Appeal, a non-profit news publication focused on criminal justice, and the co-host of the podcast Justice in America, Duffy Rice has been working in the weeds on issues that many Americans are now paying attention to in the wake of George Floyd’s killing—issues like police brutality, bloated police budgets, surveillance, pre-trial detention, cash bail, and the disproportionate police presence in communities of color. “The officer who killed George Floyd didn’t do that because he thought, ‘I’m allowed to kneel on his neck for 9 minutes, so I’ll only do it for 8 minutes and 46 seconds’,” said Atlanta-based Duffy Rice, in conversation with Jamilah King for this week’s edition of the Mother Jones Podcast. “It’s not going to be a policy reform that eliminates the [deaths of] future ‘George Floyds’. It’s going to be reducing the power of police, which is really only possible by reducing their budgetary power, at least in part.”

Speaking just days after the death of Rayshard Brooks, the unarmed Black man killed by police in Atlanta on Friday, Duffy Rice provided a user’s guide to the differences between a range of activists’ demands, including the definitions of defunding, divesting, and abolishing the police. She argues that, sure, shaving down police force budgets bit-by-bit is an important first step, but ultimately Americans should be working toward a total rethink of criminal justice—something that goes farther than anything that has been attempted or proposed in the United States thus far. “I think that ‘defund’ is a step on its way to ‘abolish’,” said Duffy Rice. “We’re a society that really relies on backend punishment, instead of trying to solve frontend problems.”

And, Duffy Rice notes that American policing cannot be separated from the issues of racial justice that have catapulted to the forefront of debates over the past three weeks. “It is rooted in a history of racial subjugation, of slavery, of Jim Crow, of classism and racism that is unlike anywhere else on the planet,” Duffy Rice said.

Listen to the full interview below on this week’s episode of the Mother Jones Podcast:

Michael Brown’s death at the hands of a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 sparked nationwide protests and jumpstarted the Black Lives Matter movement. His death also opened a conversation about the startling lack of good data on how often police use force and on whom. Nearly six years later, amid a massive new wave of activism, it’s become apparent that we have a long way to go toward fully quantifying the human toll of police violence. More bluntly: Does George Floyd’s death count? 

In 2015, then FBI-Director James Comey noted that there was better data on movie ticket sales than the use of force by cops. “It’s embarrassing and ridiculous—that we can’t talk about crime in the same way, especially in the high-stakes incidents when your officers have to use force,” he said. While there is more data now than there was then, it remains incomplete and uncentralized. At a US Commission on Civil Rights hearing in 2018, Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist and professor at the University of South Carolina, called the lack of federal data on the use of force by police a “national embarrassment.” 

The practical challenge is undeniable: With 18,000 police departments across the country, collecting meaningful data from all them is a gargantuan task that requires immense human resources to obtain, verify, analyze, and visualize data, and hardware infrastructure to host and maintain the data. 

The Center for Disease Control’s National Vital Statistics System and the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ Uniform Crime Reporting program and both log police killings, but their data are known to be incomplete. CDC’s database reported 539 deaths from “legal intervention” involving a firearm discharge in 2018. This is an undercount, since other sources have recorded many more deaths by police shootings. And this count does not include people who were not killed by gunshots, such as Floyd, who died after a police officer restrained him with a knee on his neck. 

The FBI’s database records “justifiable homicides” of “felons” by police, a flawed metric since what counts as justifiable is defined by police departments and the definition of a felon in this case isn’t someone who has been convicted of a felony, but rather someone who is perceived to be committing felony act at the time of their death. The FBI recorded 410 “justifiable homicides” by police officers in 2018. It is possible that Floyd, who was killed after officers suspected him of committing forgery by passing a $20 counterfeit bill, could  counted as a “felon” in this database? 

In the absence of reliable, complete federal data on the use of force, the task has been picked up by journalists, advocates, academics, and citizens. One of the most comprehensive, easy to use, and well-maintained data sources on police shootings the Washington Post‘s database, which its reporters built after Brown was killed. It has documented twice as many killings as the FBI or CDC databases. According to its count, since 2014, nearly 5,000 people have been fatally shot by police officers; a third of them were Black. Black people are killed at more than twice the rate as white Americans, according to the Post. But since this database only counts shootings by officers, Floyd or Eric Garner, who were both killed by chokeholds, would not be included in its data.

The Guardian published comprehensive data on fatalities caused by police use of force (including shootings) for 2015 and 2016 but has stopped since then. At a Department of Justice’s summit on violent crime reduction in 2015, Comey said, “It is unacceptable that the Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper from the UK are becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between police and civilians. That is not good for anybody.” 

Another detailed data source is Mapping Police Violence, created by data scientist Samuel Siyangwe and activist Deray McKesson. It tracks data based on news reports and  three crowdsourced databases: FatalEncounters.org, the US Police Shootings Database, and KilledbyPolice.net. It counts the deaths of people who die by any means used by police and also describes the circumstances that lead to the deadly use of force against them. But it still may not be a complete count since it doesn’t pick up deaths that aren’t mentioned in the media.

These databases only count people who are killed by police. There remains little data on instances where police use force and the victims are hurt or otherwise harmed but do not die. New Jersey Advance Media collected every instance of use of force by police officers from every police department in the state over five years. It’s a rare dataset that not only collects deaths by use of force, but also injuries. Moreover, the oldest data from all of these databases only goes back to 2013. For researchers to meaningfully analyze trends in police violence, they say they need data that goes back further and has more detail. 

“I want to know the decision to shoot. That’s what’s most important. Why did the officer decide to use deadly force?” says Alpert. “We know there’s some issues with racial disparities, but there are a lot of things about the situation we don’t know. And that’s where we’ve got to get good data. We’ve got to understand when force is used, how force is used and then we can start to go about fixing it. “

Last year, the FBI finally announced that it would start collecting comprehensive data on police violence. This new database would not only count police shootings but also “serious bodily injury” caused by the use of force. It would also count and the number of shots fired by a police officer in the direction of a civilian, even if the shots miss. But only 40 percent of the police departments nationwide are reported to have volunteered to share data and contribute to the initiative. In contrast, 18,000 local law enforcement agencies (nearly all of them), contribute to FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting system, which collects detailed crime statistics.

Researchers say this initiative should have come much sooner. In 1994, in the aftermath of the Rodney King protests in Los Angeles, Congress gave the Department of Justice the authority to sue police departments for unconstitutional practices. It also gave the attorney general’s office authority to collect data on police misconduct and use of force from law enforcement agencies from all over the country. 

Joanna Schwartz, a professor of law at the University of California Los Angeles, says the department never fully exercised its authority to compel police to turn over this data. “They essentially asked local law enforcement to produce information and there was never any consequence for agencies that that didn’t work with the attorney general’s office on these efforts,” she says. “The attorney general’s office had this power for 25 years and not used it.” She says that Congress should take matters into its own hands and fix this problem. 

Local police agencies collect detailed use of force data, but many resist sharing it, Alpert says. Both Alpert and Schwartz say the only way to get them to be more transparent by mandating data collection and sharing as a condition for receiving federal funding. For example, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has excellent data because state transportation departments have to agree to collect data in return for federal funding. 

“The notion that you can’t manage what you don’t measure has been something that has been a foundational concept in law enforcement,” Schwartz says. Police departments already use COMPSTAT, software that tracks crime hotspots and arrest rates. Similarly, there should be data to “track hotspots in police accountability,” she said. 

Of course, whether or not it appears in any of the existing databases, George Floyd’s death will count. As his memory fuels the campaign to change American policing, it should also help change the way we record and remember all those who have died or been injured under similar circumstances.

In a quest prove to the public that they have been under attack over the last several weeks, New York City police officers have spread stories that attempt to perfectly illustrate their plight. Except the stories are too perfect. So perfect that they’re not even true.

On Monday night, the New York City Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association released a statement that three officers had been poisoned by bleach-spiked milkshakes purchased at Shake Shack.

Within 12 hours, police investigators found that “there was no criminality by shake shack’s employees.”

After a thorough investigation by the NYPD’s Manhattan South investigators, it has been determined that there was no criminality by shake shack’s employees.

— Chief Rodney Harrison (@NYPDDetectives) June 16, 2020

The weird and seemingly baseless tale of milkshake malfeasance came just two days after a different New York police union, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, sardonically tweeted “NYC – Community Policing Dividend pays off big! This was tonight Flatbush Ave Brooklyn” on top of a video showing a police car window being smashed with a trashcan.

The tweet left two things out: that, as journalist Noah Hurowitz pointed out, the video was not from “tonight” but from May 30, two weeks earlier;  and that just moments prior to the video being shot, officers, in an incident that quickly went viral on social media, had driven into a group of peaceful protestors, threatening their lives.

This police union account is lying. This video appears to have been shot shot on May 30, a block down Flatbush from the now-infamous video of two NYPD SUVs driving thru a crowd of protesters at St. Marks and Flatbush https://t.co/pHsWt4uXjw

— Noah Hurowitz (@NoahHurowitz) June 15, 2020

The falsehoods spread by New York police organizations is part of a larger pattern of police seeding bad, misleading information or outright lies, often on matters of even greater consequence, to the public. But Tuesday’s milkshake misinformation, in particular, is not the first time police have incorrectly being fixated on the threat of dairy.

In early June, NYPD put out an internal report covered by the New York Post, warning hardened concrete made to look like “chocolate chip ice cream” had been discovered at protests following the police killing of George Floyd. People on social media pointed out that the concrete, which was in cut-up espresso cups with M160, the name of a type of industrial mix, written on them, looked like samples that contractors use to test mixtures. It’s possible that someone went through the trouble of putting concrete in espresso cups and then writing the type of concrete on the outside—which, you have to agree, would undermine any “ice cream” disguise—just to throw them. But is it likely? 

NYPD finds concrete disguised as ice cream at George Floyd protests https://t.co/HvvXeTJzxa pic.twitter.com/UM04re3m6A

— New York Post (@nypost) June 8, 2020

In August, Portland Police spread their own milk-based misinformation when they tweeted, without evidence, that Antifa protestors had thrown milkshakes that “contained quick-drying cement.” They were never able to verify this, and no one on the ground found proof. Even Fox News, who had initially run with the police misinformation, quietly retracted the claim.

Good stuff from Fox News who quietly changed its headline that amplified the hoax that antifa was throwing cement milkshakes at the Proud Boys in Portland without issuing a correction, or even acknowledging it pic.twitter.com/TxEN4H12xe

— Ali Breland (@alibreland) July 1, 2019

Over the past few weeks, a new hashtag has emerged on Twitter: #BlackintheIvory, a reference to being Black in the ivory tower of academia, which was first shared by two Black women in communications research. It has been posted thousands of times as the racial reckoning sparked by the police killing of George Floyd on May 25 spreads far beyond policing into industries like media, entertainment, food, tech, and more. Most of the tweets are from Black students, professors, researchers, and scholars sharing their stories of experiencing racism in the workplace and classroom: Getting passed over for jobs, or confused with maintenance staff, or called by the name of the one other Black person in their department.

Among the most widely shared tweets were those from Raven Baxter. “Raven the Science Maven,” as she is known on the internet, is currently the director of collegiate STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) initiatives at a charter school in Buffalo, New York, the founder of science advocacy organization STEMbassy, and a musician whose rap music, she hopes, inspires other Black women in science. (Her music video, “Big Ole Geeks,” is a treasure.)

Here, in her own words, she recounts her time as a corporate research scientist at a drug company in western New York—a job she left in 2017 in part because of its toxic culture. Afterward, she went into academia as an assistant professor of biology at a community college, also in western New York, where on her first day a white co-worker threatened to call the police on her. Today, she is hopeful the uprising we’re seeing across the country will bring real, lasting change, including in higher education. Her story here has been edited and condensed.

I’ve always been into science. I was a very curious kid. I mixed together chemicals from around the house, like nail polish with sugar with baby powder, just to see what would happen. I excelled in the sciences in school. I eventually made my way to Space Camp, a week-long NASA program where we explored concepts in space and did astronaut training. And I went on a scholarship, which was even cooler because my mom was a single parent and couldn’t afford to send me at a cost. I was grouped with kids who came as far as Australia, who had come to America just to go to Space Camp. From that point on, I just decided that I thought science was so cool.

I went into a STEM-focused school for college, I got a biology degree, and I ended up getting a master’s in biology. I worked as a corporate research scientist for some time. I had some experiences there that really pointed me away from that field—just really a bad culture. So I decided to go into academia.

As I was finding my way, I didn’t always have super-positive experiences. I’m really fortunate to have gotten through my undergrad and my graduate career as a biologist unscathed. It wasn’t until I started working as a corporate scientist that I started to have major issues with not feeling accepted or welcome in science. And it was a huge shock to me. I wasn’t expecting it at all. Because up until I entered corporate, the notion was always, “You’re welcome. As long as you can do the science, you can stay here.” But when I got to corporate, it wasn’t enough. There was an even smaller box that I had to fit into for people to accept me. And it seemed like nobody really was going to accept me as is. Few people talked to me, and those interactions were very brief and rarely personal. People would go out to have their lunch breaks and I was never invited. It was very obvious that I was intentionally excluded from many out-of-office get togethers. I would make every effort; I was trying my best to make it clear, like, “Hey, I’m your friend. I want to be with you guys. Please include me.” And that was never the case. I was really depressed at the time because I’m a very social person. And when nobody is really like talking to you, it just feels like an empty space.

At my job, there were two other Black people. This is in a seven-story building. The security guard worked on the first floor; he was a Black male. And then there was me; I worked on the seventh floor. My lab hired a custodian who turned out to be the third Black person in the building. When he was hired, I don’t know why she said this to me, but my co-worker, she turns to me and she says, “Good, did you see the new hire? You won’t be the token Black girl anymore.”

I laugh now. I was literally crying when she said that to me. Nobody saw me cry. I just went back to my desk and—I can do a silent cry if I try really hard. No one had ever said anything like that to me. I grew up in suburbia—Williamsville, New York, which is an upper-middle-class neighborhood, not a lot of Black kids at my school. I went to predominantly white institutions for my undergrad and master’s. I’ve never had any problems like this. So I was shocked. I’d never experienced racism like this before.

What happened after made it even worse. 

I wrote to HR. They had an anonymous report line. I wrote, “This was said to me. It hurt my feelings.” And I think I said, “You guys should probably come in here and do diversity training.” Instead of handling my report as anonymous, the head of HR drove out from Albany and pulled me out of the lab to have a meeting with me in the conference room. They automatically assumed—I’m the only Black woman working in the lab, so it had to be me. It was so uncomfortable. They made me identify who said this to me. Then they pulled her into a meeting. Mind you, I wasn’t planning on having this conversation with anybody because it was very traumatic for me. I didn’t want to talk about it, I just wanted them to have a diversity training just so that I could be more comfortable at work. They didn’t even do that. They didn’t even invite me into the conversation with my co-worker. They talked to us separately, and then they left. 

My doctor was the first to recommend that I leave my position in corporate because I was exhibiting severe physical signs of stress. I had to sit back and think, do I want to make a career in this space where I’m not being included? After speaking with other people in my field, other Black women, they’re like, “Hey, this is how it is everywhere. No matter where you go, that’s going to be your experience. And you’re either going to suck it up and stay, or you’re going to figure something else out.” I ended up leaving. And I hate to be a part of that statistic of Black women who leave STEM, but the reality is, it’s not that we can’t do the work. It’s just that we’re not being included enough to feel like we should stay.

So that’s one of the main reasons why I went into academia. It was because, based on my experiences as a student, I felt like going into academia was a safer place for me. But as soon as I got to the other side of things, as a faculty member and as a staff member—oh my gosh, I faced some of the same challenges that I did in corporate.

I was so excited to start this job. So, I get to work early. I didn’t know where to go, so I went to see if there was something for me in the office that I should pick up. I say hi to the secretary, and she says, “Oh, let’s go check your mailbox. Your mailbox is around the corner, walk down the hall, make a left, and it’s room such-and-such.”

As I’m walking down the hall, I see another person. They’re walking towards me. And I waved because I’m the new kid, you know, the new hire, and I’m excited to meet people. And the person just did not wave, did not smile. They were looking at me, but there was no acknowledgment of my existence, which was crazy. It’s already awkward when you wave to someone and they don’t wave back, but if they also don’t smile, and they’re looking right at you, it feels very personal.

We ended up going in the same direction. And it became obvious to me that we were going to the same room, the mailroom. I’m fumbling, trying to figure out the key because I want to test out the door myself. So I’m walking behind this woman. We get to the doorway to the mailroom and she turns and looks over her shoulder and she doesn’t move. She stops, she turns around in the doorway. And now we’re facing each other and I’m like, “Hi?” And she’s like, “What are you doing?” I explain I’m gonna go check my mail. And this isn’t verbatim, but she says, “You don’t belong here. This is the faculty mailroom.” I told her, “I work here. I’m gonna go get my mail.” And so she opened the door, we go into the mailroom, and I’m looking for my mailbox. I’ve never been in the room before. And so it looks like I’m searching for something, and I don’t know where it is. If somebody was working there, they would know straight where to go, right? So I gave her that benefit of the doubt.

She says, “No, I’ve never seen you before. I’m gonna need to see your identification.” And I’m like, fair, you know? I pull out my ID. It says assistant professor of biology, the name of the school, my picture, the year. Also, there was a copier machine in there and I recognized the scanning pad. I scan my card and hey look! It buzzes me into the printer. And she was like, “I don’t think that’s real. I’m gonna have to call the cops.” I’m like, “What? Wait a second. No, I work here.” She asks me where my office is, and I didn’t know because nobody had shown me where my office was. It was so overwhelming.

I couldn’t find my mailbox. I was too frustrated. Too surprised. Too shocked. I was only about 23 years old when this happened, and so I didn’t have enough of a voice. I was still pretty young to say, “Hey lady, get off my back. I work here. I just showed you my ID. It’s my first day. Leave me alone.” Instead, what I did was walk with her to the department office so the secretary could vouch for me—another white woman—so that they could communicate to each other that I am an actual person and that I exist and that I actually work there. And so the suspicious woman said, “Oh, well, why didn’t you say anything? You just don’t look like you could work here.” And she walked away. There was no apology. It was so uncomfortable. And I don’t know if the worst part about it was the secretary was just like, “All right. That’s solved. And now go about your day.”

When I made the #BlackintheIvory post, people said, “Oh, well, you’re probably young.” Yes, but there’s a difference between a  misunderstanding and threatening to call the police. You don’t threaten to call the cops on somebody that you think is too young to be somewhere, unless they’re at a bar. I was checking my mail. I had a suit on. There was nothing violent going on, there was no reason to call law enforcement. Professors send students in the faculty mailroom all the time to run errands. To make copies. To go fetch things from the printer. So it didn’t even occur to her that I could be even one of those students. She didn’t ask me, “Are you somebody’s student?” It just went straight to, “I’m gonna call the police.”

This is the Black experience. Because being a professor in higher education is a privilege. And when people see that a Black person has that privilege, they automatically are suspicious.

I’ve been making music since high school. After I shifted careers and completely changed my life path around, I thought, “Oh my god, I gotta just sit down and take a second and just regroup.” I started thinking about music again. I thought I was going to have a career in the lab. I love teaching, but I really had to sit down and reassess. And one of the things that came out of that was, I wanted to make sure that there was some type of message out there for Black women that said they belong in the space. And it’s not them—it’s literally everything else. It’s the culture. It’s the lack of diversity. So my music is really a tool. It’s a medicine. It’s a Bible. It’s what I think Black women need to hear to be encouraged to stay in their STEM fields, especially if they don’t have somebody around them on a day-to-day basis to really empower them and make them feel like they’re competent, that they’re welcome, and that they’re accepted.

I believe that in STEM, we really have to make spaces for people to be their unapologetic selves. A huge reason why Black people leave STEM is because we feel like we have to be the whitewashed version of ourselves at work, to be very honest with you, just so that we’re palatable. And it’s not to say that we’re not palatable as ourselves, but the current state of STEM culture is that you have to speak a certain way. You can’t be goofy because then people won’t take you seriously, especially if you’re Black, because people think that you’re a token hire and that you can’t actually do your job that you were hired to do, even though you have the qualifications for it and the credentials. It’s very stressful. And a lot of Black people have to actively maintain this false identity when they go to work in STEM spaces just to exist. 

All of the different things that people are bringing with them when you hire them—their values, their identity, their cultural identity, their background, their experiences—those are all valuable. And if you’re inviting diverse people into your STEM workspace, you have to make sure that you’re making it a comfortable and inclusive environment so that they can do the work and make those important contributions. Because if you had the experience that I had, where you’re constantly feeling like you’re less than everybody else, there’s no way that you could do your best work in that type of environment.

A lot of Black women like me are experiencing this trauma, but we stay in these fields because we need to be in these classrooms so that we can break the cycle. Sometimes we just take the beating. Our ancestors did it for us, literally.

Right now, we’re really calling on white people to be just like, “Hey, wake up. You’ve got nothing else to do. COVID’s got you at home. You’re not at work. Listen.” I also think there is so much pressure right now for marginalized communities to scream as loud as they can: “Hey! We’re here.” It’s kind of like, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, where everybody’s really small and they’re trying to get big people’s attention. Then all of a sudden the big person looks down. “Oh! Little people!” That’s how it feels right now. We’re like, “Hey, we’re here. Now while you’re looking, look at all this stuff we’ve been through for 400 years.” It’s like we’re doing a crash course. It’s really exhausting.

What keeps me going is knowing that people like me, and countless others, are working so hard to make sure that the next generation does not have these experiences. And I’m really grateful for the #BlackintheIvory hashtag because it’s really brought to light all these issues. I was shocked to read other people’s stories. I thought my story was bad. And not that it was the Trauma Olympics, but we have a first-hand account of the work that we need to do to make academia a safer and healthier place for Black people. Having that evidence, those first-hand accounts of things that have happened, we know that there’s progress to be made and that there’s work to be done. We have proof. Now we have to do the work.

On Sunday morning, Ben Carson, the head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the only Black member of Donald Trump’s cabinet, declined to back up Trump’s oft-repeated claim that he’s done the most of any president for the African American community since Abraham Lincoln. 

In an interview with George Stephanopolous on ABC’s This Week, Carson said it’s not “productive” to have the debate about whether or not Trump has been the best president for Black people. The remarks came after the president’s interview with Fox News on Friday, where he once again made the claim: “I think I’ve done more for the Black community than any other president, and let’s take a pass on Abraham Lincoln because he did good…although it’s always questionable,” Trump said. 

JUST IN: In an interview with @GStephanopoulos on @ThisWeekABC, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson declines to back President Trump's claim that he’s the best president for black America since Abraham Lincoln. https://t.co/cSOs65iULu pic.twitter.com/XJPO3btemu

— ABC News (@ABC) June 14, 2020

Carson said it was more important to highlight what the president has actually done, as he launched into a modest list of administration initiatives that he said had benefited African Americans. “The opportunity zones were designed to bring money into areas that are traditionally neglected,” the secretary said. “It has been quite successful. Prison reform has been quite successful.”

But Stephanopoulous pushed further, asking Carson if Trump should stop making the claim altogether. “It’s hard to compare that to Lyndon Johnson passing the Civil Rights Act, Ulysses Grant sending in troops to take on the Ku Klux Klan, President Eisenhower sending in troops to enforce Brown v. Board of Education,” the host pointed out.

While Carson didn’t answer directly, he conceded those historic presidential actions were noteworthy while stopping short of admitting they outstrip his bosses’ accomplishments. “All of which is a significant part of our history,” he responded. “We should be willing to look at what we’ve done collectively to make progress.”

For much of Friday, Fox News’ website featured images of Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone that were clearly photoshopped to depict the CHAZ as some sort of lawless hellscape guarded by heavily armed anarchists. Or anarchist, rather—Fox News used the same guy in both photoshopped images. The doctored photos were pulled when a Seattle Times reporter called them out. 

The images were a mashup of photos from different days, shot by different photographers. Protesters have taken over a handful of blocks near a recently abandoned police precinct and turned it into a cop-free zone. While there have been instances of police shooting tear gas at protesters, the CHAZ has been mostly peaceful, with protesters screening movies and setting up food gardens and co-ops. On Friday, Fox News had no disclaimers that the images were manipulated in any way. The site also included an image of buildings burning under a “Crazy Town” headline for a story about Seattle’s CHAZ. That photo was taken May 30 in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Here’s one of Fox News’ CHAZ composites: 

The Seattle Times‘ Jim Brunner broke the story. He writes: 

The network’s misleading and faked images were published as the Capitol Hill zone — quickly labeled CHAZ — became a political flashpoint for conservatives nationally and a target of tweets by President Donald Trump, who has branded the demonstrators “domestic terrorists” and threatened federal action unless local officials “take back” the area.

In a statement, Fox News told Brunner, “We have replaced our photo illustration with the clearly delineated images of a gunman and a shattered storefront, both of which were taken this week in Seattle’s autonomous zone.” This isn’t true, as Brunner points out. The gunman photo was June 10, but the storefront images were taken May 30.

Brunner tracked down the photographer who took one of the photos.  

The June 10 photo of an unidentified man with a gun standing in front of a car in CHAZ was taken by Seattle freelance photographer David Ryder, who distributed the photo through Getty Images.

The image, as displayed on the Fox News website, was spliced with other photos, including a photo of a smashed retail storefront in May, making it look as though the scene was all playing out concurrently in the autonomous zone. “It is definitely Photoshopped,” confirmed Ryder. “To use a photo out of context in a journalistic setting like that seems unethical.”

It’s a short step from manipulating the narrative around anti-racist protesters to manipulating images of them. Fox News took it as clumsily as possible. Three stories on the website now carry an editor’s note saying the “collage did not clearly delineate between these images, and has since been replaced.”

Meanwhile, on TV, Fox News mistook a Monty Python joke for a sign of political infighting within the CHAZ:

Here’s the clip: pic.twitter.com/r88YTqjOJP

— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) June 13, 2020

Here’s the gag being referenced:

 

This story was published in partnership with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

The image on Facebook showed three raised fists — one white, one brown, one black — with the hashtag BLM overlaid in large letters. A date and place to meet was at the bottom: Thursday, June 4. The location: Anna, Illinois.

A Black Lives Matter protest. In Anna?

In November, I’d published a story about this small southern Illinois city’s reputation as a sundown town—a place where black people were not welcome after dark—and the legend about what Anna stands for: “Ain’t No N——— Allowed.” The article stirred up strong feelings in the town, where all public officials, police officers and nearly all teachers are white. While many current and former residents wrote to me to share their own stories about racism in the area, others decried the story as perpetuating the A-N-N-A reputation.

A Black Lives Matter protest in Anna. Who was behind it? How many people would join? What would the reaction be?

And what would this mean for A-N-N-A?

“I was terrified to do this. I’m not going to lie,” said Jessica Moore, 25, one of the organizers.

She added, “I’ve experienced racism in Anna my entire life.”

Moore, who is biracial, grew up in Ullin, a small town about 20 minutes south of Anna. Her earliest memory of being a victim of racism in Anna happened when she was 8, she told me. As she was leaving the Anna Walmart with her mother, who is white, Moore said she remembers a woman screaming at her after she accidentally pushed a shopping cart into her car, repeatedly calling Moore the N-word. When she got older and started going to bars and restaurants in Anna, she said people would call her the N-word, too.

Moore is one of a small group of young people in southern Illinois leading the region’s recent demonstrations against police brutality and in support of black lives, many in towns with histories like Anna’s. Most of the organizers did not know one another a month ago. And many, like Moore, are new to the cause.

After she took part in her first protest in Paducah, Kentucky, on May 31, Moore said leaders there encouraged her to organize in her own community and gave her some tips. A few days later, a lightbulb went off: “It’s time to show Anna,” she thought.

Anna resident Takiyah Coleman, 19, agreed. The two, along with several other young adults from the area, met with Anna Police Chief Bryan Watkins to explain their plan to protest. Watkins said he told them he wanted to ensure they felt safe coming to town to do so, but to also expect some opposition from residents.

“We’ve never had a demonstration in town like this,” Watkins, who said he’s lived in Anna for 45 years, later told me. (He prefers to use the word “demonstrate” instead of “protest,” he said, because “people associate protest with rioting.”)

When Watkins informed residents through his personal Facebook page about the event, the post prompted more than 350 shares and 600 comments, which ranged from curiosity to praise to fear.

“I hope everyone is ready to protect their business with brute force!” wrote one commenter from the area.

“How long do these things typically last??” wrote another.

The comments reminded me of stories people in Anna have told me about rumors spreading through town in the late 1960s and early 1970s that black people from Cairo, about 30 minutes south, were coming up to Anna to riot. That never happened, but some residents remember waiting with guns in case it did.

Anna City Council member Bryan Miller said he got received calls from residents concerned about the Black Lives Matter protest. He and I have been talking since November, when he commented on a Facebook post about my story, saying: “Uhm, I’m guessing [A-N-N-A] doesn’t go away because you keep writing about an issue that is long gone.”

I’ve appreciated our frank discussions about the story and about his community. A new City Council member, Miller said he is determined to erase the A-N-N-A stigma. When residents called him with concerns about the protest, he said that he told them it was a chance to change Anna’s reputation, and that, “I expect you to do your part.”

The day of the protest, a post on the official Facebook page for Anna expressed a similar sentiment: “In recent months, citizens were outraged over an article written about Anna. Well, actions speak louder than words. Tonight is our chance to show the world what we are made of.”

Moore, one of the organizers, said she expected about 60 people to show up. She was wrong.

Nearly 200 people marched through Anna’s streets. Many of them were young and white and described themselves as being from southern Illinois. Other area residents gathered along the route to watch an event many thought they’d never see.

Alexis Steward, 21, who grew up in Anna and helped organize the march, said she spent much of it bawling. The tears started when she began to realize how many people had shown up. She remembered when she was bullied at Anna junior high. She said she wants Anna to be a place where she feels she could start a family, and where she wouldn’t have to worry about her children feeling the pain she felt growing up there.

“I’ve always been shy,” Steward said. “Not anymore.”

“We need more people who are educated, loud and who can stand for people who cannot.”

When she marched past some Anna residents she recognized, who she said were screaming at the protesters to “get out of their town,” she said she knew she was doing something right.

So, too, did Aveon Winfield, another organizer, who grew up in nearby Grand Chain. When he heard onlookers repeatedly use the N-word, Winfield, 21, said he kept his eyes fixed on the ground and marched on. Winfield’s mother has worked for years at a mental health center in Anna. He thought about her, a woman of color, spending her days in a town where some residents still used racial slurs.

Coleman said she wanted the protest to show other residents that “change starts here.” Coleman and her family moved to Anna from Chicago three years ago, she said. She knew what Anna stood for but said she didn’t think much of it until a white customer at the local McDonald’s, where she worked, refused to let her pour his coffee.

Among the marchers, too, was Easter Smith.

I first met Easter in 2018, after a number of Anna residents suggested I speak with her. At the time, Smith and her six children were one of the few black families living in Anna. Her eldest son, Arieh, had won the Illinois state wrestling championship for his weight class. He was elected homecoming king of Anna-Jonesboro Community High School. I wrote about how the family challenged many white residents’ assumptions about black people while quietly struggling to balance their very public status in the community with the private pain of the racism they experienced.

Easter said she has lost some friends in Anna and become more outspoken about her experience there since the story was published. Last week, her family moved about 20 minutes away, to Murphysboro. She said she would have liked to stay in Anna until her children finished school there, but she had trouble finding a comfortable home to rent. She decided to march before she left, she said, because she felt she “needed to see it.”

“How are we going to be one of the first black families and not go to the protest?” Easter said.

Early on during the protest, a speaker, who was white, reminded the crowd of the signs posted around the city limits in Arieh’s honor, a positive contrast to signs long rumored to have once warned black people to be out of town before dark.

Two thoughts struck Easter. The first, she said, was that, as a black person in America, “Normally when your name is called in public, it’s because it’s in memorial.” The second: It “doesn’t take away racism because a black kid holds a title at your school.”

The protest ended peacefully. Police made no arrests. No property was damaged.

The protest was covered across the region and the focus of a Reuters story about small-town Black Lives Matter protests, which was republished by national news outlets.

The headline of a story in the Southern Illinoisan referenced a chant repeated at the protest: “Ain’t No Negativity Allowed,” a new, positive twist on A-N-N-A.

Miller, the City Council member, said he’s thinking about making yard signs for residents with the slogan. Everybody is welcome in Anna, he said.

I asked him what he thinks can be done to show that beyond the protest.

“It’s our responsibility to change everything that is going on around here,” Miller said. “If people were more just willing to talk to other people, things would change so much quicker.”

I asked some of the organizers, too, whether Anna still deserves A-N-N-A.

Moore didn’t think so, though she said, “There are people in Anna that still give Anna the name it has.”

But Coleman disagreed. The town is still A-N-N-A, she said.

“The people in the town have to change in order for that to change. They have to make it mean something else,” Coleman said. “They have to not be racist.”

But, she added: “Change starts somewhere, and if a group of teenagers have to be the ones to do it, so be it.”

Another week, another bunch of racist statues gone. This time it was Christopher Columbus, patron saint of problematic iconography, taking a tumble. On Tuesday and Wednesday, protesters pulled down a Columbus statue at the State Capitol in Minnesota, threw another one in Richmond, Virginia, into a lake, and beheaded a third in Boston. (The rest of the statue in Boston was also taken down the next day.)

Plenty of ink has been spilled correcting the record on Columbus and reminding people that he was a slaver, a murderer, and a harbinger of settler colonialism in the Americas, and the arguments against celebrating his federal holiday have caught on in recent years. Still, it is significant that two of these monuments to Columbus were brought down by Indigenous people during demonstrations organized to acknowledge anti-Indigenous racism. 

Members of the American Indian Movement are preparing to tear down the statue of Christopher Columbus at the Minnesota State capitol pic.twitter.com/8vLdELlxqG

— Max Nesterak (@maxnesterak) June 10, 2020

The recent protests were spurred by the killing of George Floyd and have focused on police brutality and anti-Black racism in the US, but they’ve made space to address a number of white supremacy’s sins against various peoples around the world. In toppling monuments, people are denouncing everything from the genocide of Indigenous peoples to the crimes of Leopold II in Congo.

Christopher Columbus is the ur-colonialist, the symbol of all the injustices of Western history that flowed from his first voyage in 1492. The ubiquity of his image in cities throughout the Americas is an affront to the Black and Indigenous people who have been the primary victims of his legacy. Three toppled statues are just a start.

The Columbus statues are the latest in a string of racist symbols that have been toppled, torched, occupied, or otherwise defaced in recent weeks. Read the full list here. 

Late one night at the end of May, as spray paint, fires, and looting reigned across Minneapolis, an Indigenous hip-hop artist named Tall Paul was roving the streets in a truck, looking for looters and arsonists. “It looked like that movie The Purge,” he says. “It was lawless.” Days before, Paul had joined the American Indian Movement Patrol, a group of Native Americans volunteering to maintain neighborhood safety and protect key buildings from destruction amid the rebellion. 

Paul and the other volunteers on shift were on their way to check on the offices of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe when they saw four white teenagers looting a nearby liquor store. They stopped their truck and three of the teens fled, while Paul’s group caught up with the fourth. Soon his buddies returned, and all were made to lie on the ground so they couldn’t run away, then give their names and wait for a parent to come pick them up. The teens had driven 90 miles from suburban Wisconsin to take advantage of the chaos.

With a veto-proof majority of Minneapolis City Council members pledging to disband their police force, many wonder, “What comes next?” Activists from communities of color say the answer has been lurking under the city’s nose all along: neighborhood-based initiatives that protect property and prevent violence. In Minneapolis, those groups—AIM Patrol, as well as First Nations United, the Little Earth Patrol, and the NAACP’s Minnesota Freedom Riders, among others—are not new, but today they share a common vision: Without police, communities can maintain their own safety with less brutality and more accountability.

On Friday, the City Council voted unanimously to begin moving toward a “transformative new model” of public safety. “Safety is being able to decide who supports you,” says Arianna Nason of MPD150, a group that conducted a 150-year performance review of the Minneapolis Police Department. “It is absolutely imperative that we find community-based, community-controlled, bottom-up solutions.” 

Native groups have a special place in the history of organizing, and of fighting police brutality, in Minneapolis. With more than 35,000 Native Americans in its greater metro area, the city has been a major urban hub for Indigenous people since the federal government began moving them off reservations in the 1950s. In 1968, fed up with unlawful arrests, police violence, and poverty, a group of Natives in Minneapolis launched the American Indian Movement, an organization dedicated to addressing chronic neglect and abuse. AIM became a national civil rights group, unifying tribes across the country and successfully challenging a federal “termination” policy that aimed to end the special status of Indigenous peoples by withdrawing federal services and aid.

From the beginning, members of AIM volunteered to patrol neighborhoods in order to document the Minneapolis Police Department’s rampant violence against Natives, which allegedly included coldblooded murders and rapes. As AIM co-founder Dennis Banks said at the time, police harassment was “an everyday fact for Indian peoples” in Minneapolis; the Black Panthers’ patrols had successfully reduced violence in their neighborhoods, “and we’re going to have to do the same.” Within a year, AIM Patrol claimed they’d seen 22 consecutive weeks without a Native being arrested, while in years prior they’d seen five or six Natives arrested per day. The Patrol has existed off and on ever since.

Mike Forcia, who is Anishinaabe and has worked with the American Indian Movement since its early days, revived AIM Patrol from its most recent hiatus in 2010 after witnessing EMTs roughly handle the dying body of an Ojibwe elder who’d been violently attacked (the death was never investigated). Along the way, he’s had his own run-ins with racist Minneapolis police, and received a $125,000 settlement from their department after officers who “misidentified him” beat him during an arrest in 1999. Forcia says that incident began when he witnessed a Minneapolis police officer holding a gun to a Native girl’s head.

Tall Paul, for his part, once saw a cop grope his mother during a traffic stop, and later watched police beat his older brother, then whisper that they’d kill him if he ever brought a lawsuit. 

Though the current political moment focuses on violence against Black communities, police killings of Natives have long gone overlooked, in part because some departments don’t identify or track Indigenous victims. A CNN analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Native Americans were slightly more likely than Black people to die at the hands of law enforcement between 1999 and 2015, though the rates are often neck-and-neck—and deeply intertwined.

In 2011, Derek Chauvin, the officer who killed George Floyd, was involved in the shooting of an Alaska Native named Leroy Martinez. (A witness claimed Martinez had surrendered his gun and had his hands in the air when he was shot.) Recognizing their common experience of police brutality, Native youth stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Black protesters throughout this year’s Minneapolis uprising. 

For the past few years, AIM Patrol has been “under the radar,” says Forcia. His recruits walk the streets, deterring both police and intra-community violence by intervening or simply bearing witness to make accountability possible. Members can also be called upon to safely escort women, elders, or others who don’t feel safe moving through the neighborhood alone. Forcia has expanded the definition of Patrol duties to include cooking hot breakfasts for the unhoused and checking on overlooked neighbors.

Compared to the police, Forcia says AIM Patrol has “a more hands-on, personal approach” to safety. “You do it with kindness and generosity, but you always have to be alert.” Though the reality is that some communities prefer armed patrols, Forcia emphasizes that real peace arises when people’s needs are being met. He says that like cops, AIM Patrol members are “never really off duty,” but that usually means helping people move, offering rides, and sitting with those who might hurt themselves. 

“If it’s a mental health crisis, I feel like an armed cop shouldn’t be coming, because they’re gonna come with a warrior mentality,” says Paul, who is Ojibwe and Oneida. “Mental health workers could be called. If there’s an overdose, a medic could be called. It shouldn’t just be ‘cops or nothing.'” But as of now, “people don’t know who to call besides 911.”

Paul and Forcia believe AIM Patrol could help fill that gap. Their group already helps with security for the city’s colorful Mayday Parade, and Forcia says he’s now in talks to support events in local parks, since the Minneapolis Park Board recently voted to cut ties with the police department.

Forcia says Mayor Jacob Frey exempted AIM Patrol from the city’s curfew so that they could protect their community. Meanwhile, City Council member Jeremiah Ellison, the son of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, was driving around with a pistol and fire extinguisher to protect his home neighborhood in north Minneapolis, along with the Minnesota Freedom Riders, a group of volunteers organized by a local NAACP chapter. These patrols, as well as many others, acted as a deterrent against burning and looting, specifically protecting Black- and Native-owned businesses and community centers, they say.

As my colleague Julia Lurie reported from Minneapolis:

Residential neighborhoods formed security teams…equipped with block leaders, text threads, and schedules for sitting out on stoops with fire extinguishers. I ran into these community security guards repeatedly as I walked home around midnight after reporting on a protest a week after Floyd’s death. From their stoops, they asked me who I was, and then if I needed help. One man, standing on the corner with a team on Hennepin Avenue, said he would walkie talkie his neighbors down the street so they would know to expect me.

As 92 percent of Minneapolis police officers live outside the city, Paul thinks it’s time for a localized approach to safety. “When it’s someone from the community, there’s accountability because everybody knows them,” he says. Unlike a police officer, “if I were to do something dirty or unjust to people I know, I would be held accountable.” Patrol members should “be on their feet, not in the car with a barrier between them and the people.”

Certain Black activists, Minneapolis officials, and experts have embraced these arguments. Grassroots organizations Reclaim the Block and Black Visions Collective hosted the historic rally where nine of the city’s 13 council members pledged to initiate a transition away from policing and toward “a transformative model for cultivating safety.” When making his pledge, council member Phillipe Cunningham argued that the city has “poured [money] into the police department” while other groups “have been doing this work for decades and not getting paid.” In a press release, Reclaim the Block and Black Visions Collective, which both advocate for police abolition, acknowledged that their movement had been “built alongside the presence and legacy” of AIM Patrol, whose members attended the event.

AIM Patrol could help replace the police “because it is supported by the community,” says Nason of MPD150. “I trust my relatives to take the right approach to my personal safety.”

Yet Nason acknowledges that this type of solution could still beget profiling, harassment, and killings in communities where racism is rampant: Trayvon Martin was killed by an overzealous neighborhood watch volunteer, and while police abolitionists say that certain situations should be handled by social workers instead of cops, the social work institution has its own racist tendencies. “Part of the work of abolition has to be shifting the mindset and culture that’s all around us,” says Nason. “We’re going to have to tackle that head-on with difficult conversations” about prejudice, gun laws, and more.

Forcia has long covered AIM Patrol expenses, such as patrol car repairs, out of his own pocket, or by selling T-shirts in the community.  If Minneapolis were to divert some of its $189 million police budget to neighborhood groups like his, he could develop robust training programs, distribute information about gun laws and safety, and feed and clothe neighbors in need—because “why would you loot if you already have enough at home?” he asks.

He’d also like to restart violence prevention initiatives like the American Indian–Somali Friendship Committee, which began bringing the two communities together for children’s basketball games and potlucks in 2010. While the project had some success in reducing neighborhood tensions, it folded after just a few years when city funding was cut.

Riding the global wave of removing historically fraught monuments, Forcia on Wednesday led the charge to pull down a statue of Christopher Columbus that stood outside the Minnesota State Capitol. Even this is part of a larger vision to lift up local communities: He’d like to hold the state’s largest-ever powwow on the Capitol grounds (and he’s in talks with Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan, who is also Anishinaabe, to make it happen). “We’d invite the Somali community, and the Aztecs and the Hmong and all of Minnesota, to get to know each other as brothers and sisters.”

Forcia believes that investing in intercultural exchange, along with education, housing, and food, can heal the wounds that beget violence. “We certainly are hoping,” he says. “We’ve seen things in the past two weeks that I never thought would happen. You got Nancy Pelosi kneeling, so many cops kneeling…now is the time, and we are who we have been waiting for.”

Correction, June 20, 2023: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of Native Americans in the Minneapolis metro area.

When it’s said that you can hear the history of freedom movements in John Coltrane’s 1963 “Alabama,” it’s more than metaphor: Coltrane patterned his horn lines after Martin Luther King Jr.’s vocal inflections. He reworked the cadences of King’s speech after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing by the Ku Klux Klan, which killed four Black girls, into the song. King’s tone is remade in Coltrane’s rising saxophone solo, Elvin Jones’ crashing cymbals and percussive shots, McCoy Tyner’s rolling block chords, and Jimmy Garrison’s low-register groundswell. This is music that’s rooted in purpose, principle, and memory.

And it’s especially relevant now. Coltrane’s “Alabama” of 1963 is an America of 2020:

It’s far from the only entry in a necessary realm of politically engaged expression. I’ve been returning to a few recordings that, beyond their musical greatness, address this country’s open wounds and long history of racism directly. There are many songs for moments like this—it is never not a moment like this—when you don’t want to read between lines; you want to, or need to, or should hear chants grow and voices rise.

There is “Dred Scott,” the riveting first track on 10 Freedom Summers, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s 2013 recording. The “summers” he chose are those between 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education and 1964’s Civil Rights Act, and each track points to a civil rights theme or event. The music is elegiac, mournful, and mountainous, summiting the heights in sound that this country hasn’t in society. Which might sound like an overly tight frame for the entire jazz canon, but this music hits multiple registers. Smith grew up less than 30 miles away from where Emmett Till was murdered, in Mississippi, in 1955, and sees the signposts. Give it a listen.

Next: Smith again, here with the phenomenally talented, historically informed, and mesmerizing Vijay Iyer. The pianist—a MacArthur grant winner—has Amiri Baraka’s consciousness in his mind and music, and Cecil Taylor’s stature and clout to his name, but Iyer is a force unto himself. Smith and Iyer are joined by bassist Reggie Workman, tabla player Nitin Mitta, and vibraphonist Patricia Brennan:

As a bonus, catch the heavier, sharper thunder of Iyer with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, a recording I’ve been spinning, and spinning, and spinning, as the days blur:

Jubilation doesn’t arise in spite of protest—it’s present at the root. Coverage of this year’s uprisings has rightfully focused on the torrent of police brutality against protesters. But rebellion is also festive. It can be beautiful, joyful, and catchy. As Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman famously wrote about dancing in a revolution, freedom fighters shouldn’t “demand the denial of life and joy.” And as one organizer in Lexington, Kentucky, put it recently, “Black joy is a state of resistance.”

People claiming their power have marched to brass bands in New Orleans, danced after curfew in Oakland, and chanted “fuck these racist-ass police” over techno beats in Detroit. We’re watching in real time as each city shows how it demands and celebrates the movement’s growing triumphs. Here are a few of our favorites:

WE LOVE THIS FUCKING CITY! Detroit is the birthplace of techno and techno is BLACK 🖤 #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/fJTSmGH1nK

— think for yourself&question 👁 (@madiidanae) June 6, 2020

Detroit is a lot of things, but it doesn’t get enough credit as the birthplace of techno music. Just like Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder (and yours truly), techno is from Detroit and techno is Black—despite what the dance floors of Europe would have you think. How fitting, then, for techno to serve as the score to remix a chant about police brutality as protesters marched through the city proclaiming the importance Black lives. Motown music has always been movement music, and techno is no exception. —Camille Squires

"Lose Yo Job" By Me & @Remixgodsuede 🔥🚀😎 • #iMarkkeyz pic.twitter.com/9vtFay03oj

— iMarkkeyz (@iMarkkeyz) June 4, 2020

The “You about to lose your job” song is already on the streets You love to see it pic.twitter.com/Q4B0WcdJC9

— 🙋🏼‍♂️johntrowbridge (@JohnTrowbridge) June 6, 2020

OK, so this was actually filmed in February. But iMarkkeyz—the DJ behind the Cardi B coronavirus remix we were all singing two months ago—was prescient in auto-tuning Johnniqua Charles’ takedown of the security guard detaining her outside a South Carolina club, because “you about to lose yo’ job” has since been bumped in the streets of Minneapolis and weaponized against cops, mayors, and the president. —Delilah Friedler

View this post on Instagram

New Orleans protest a lil different 🖤✊🏿 #repost @itchy_videos

A post shared by YABA (@fiyawata) on Jun 7, 2020 at 8:05am PDT

When I lived in New Orleans, I never went to a protest march that didn’t feel like a parade. The city has always danced through its pain—residents celebrated Mardi Gras six months after Hurricane Katrina, and are famous for mirthful jazz funerals. Their response to the uprising is no exception; these protesters reveled in the French Quarter. —Delilah Friedler

As protests against brutality sprung up around the country, listens of “Fuck Tha Police” skyrocketed. Before, N.W.A.’s 1988 protest song had averaged about 387 listens a day, according to data from music site last.fm, which collects users’ listening logs from places like iTunes and Spotify. On June 1, it peaked at 5,653 listens—more than 14 times the song’s normal popularity. (Neither Spotify nor Apple Music responded to requests for listening data.)

Listens to “Fuck Tha Police” have dipped a bit since then. But why not raise that number again? Have a good weekend, see you in the streets.

The nation’s top military official apologized Thursday for appearing in a photo op with President Trump, for which police cleared the way by tear-gassing peaceful protesters.

“I should not have been there,” Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a prerecorded address to the National Defense University. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”

Milley’s statement follows a stern rebuke of the stunt by former Defense Secretary James Mattis and represents a significant departure from the Trump administration’s often sycophantic obedience to the president’s whims. His comments also contrast with congressional Republicans’ general refusal to condemn the president’s authorization of violence against civilians exercising their right to peaceably assemble.

“As a commissioned, uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from, and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it,” Milley said. “We who wear the cloth of our nation come from the people of our nation, and we must hold dear the principle of an apolitical military that is so deeply rooted in the essence of our republic.”

Watch the video below:

In a stunning rebuke to the Commander in Chief, General Mark Milley has apologized for taking part in Trump's photo op in Lafayette Square.

"We must hold dear the principle of an apolitical military that is so deeply rooted in the essence of our republic." pic.twitter.com/kHCTAHhRyl

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) June 11, 2020

On May 30, Johan Montes Cuevas heard about a protest against police brutality in Phoenix from a couple of friends. They got together and talked about going downtown to watch thousands march in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Montes Cuevas was unsure about going, “since I obviously have to be more careful because of my status.” In the end, he decided to go.

As the night went on and the protest grew in size, Montes Cuevas remembers being impressed with the large turnout. “That goes to show how much people care,” he thought to himself. “We all just want equality.” Eventually, his fiancee called and told him to go home, just to be safe—she is a US citizen, but Montes Cuevas is not. “I just never thought anything would happen,” he told me.

The three friends stayed a bit longer before heading back to their car to leave. As they sat in traffic, the police showed up. One of Montes Cuevas’ friends posted a video on social media showing police officers pulling people out of cars to arrest them. Soon, the three of them found themselves on the ground, at the feet of a group of Phoenix cops holding riot shields. They were booked and charged with rioting, alongside some 100 other people arrested in downtown Phoenix that night.

The next morning, as people were released from jail and started heading home, Montes Cuevas, one of his friends, and two other undocumented people who also had been picked up at the protest were surprised to find Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents waiting to take them into custody as soon as they stepped outside.  

As protests spread across the country following George Floyd’s death in late May, so did warnings to undocumented immigrants thinking about joining the demonstrations. Messages on social media warned that ICE officers were on the ground: “ICE is at the protest, if you’re undocumented leave!” one person tweeted. “Please if you’re of undocumented status or have DACA PLEASE PRIORITIZE YOUR SAFETY FIRST! ICE is taking advantage,” read another tweet. “CBP and ICE agents are at protests across the country. They have made claims to the media they aren’t going to arrest people, but we know they are notorious liars,” tweeted the advocacy group United We Dream. “Stay alert. Plan ahead.” There were soon online guides with resources on what undocumented people could do to stay safe, because an arrest at a protest has the potential to end in deportation.

Montes Cuevas, 22, didn’t see those posts online. He was born in Mexico but has lived in Phoenix since he was six months old and says he considers himself “more American than Mexican sometimes.” Over the last few years, he has received temporary protection from deportation and a work permit under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. To qualify for DACA, he had to meet multiple requirements, including having a clean criminal record. “I’ve always had in mind that if at any point I get arrested,” he told me, “there’d be a big chance I could be deported.”

The night he spent in jail, Montes Cuevas said, he didn’t get to make a phone call until 10 hours after he was arrested. His fiancee and his family were worried sick. “This isn’t the first time we all lose someone; we’ve lost undocumented family before,” he said, speaking about an all-too-common scenario in which a loved one gets picked up by ICE and never comes home. 

US Customs and Border Protection said in an email to Mother Jones last week that the agency had deployed resources to “several states undertaking various operational support roles at the request of fellow law enforcement agencies.” The CBP agents were sent to “confront the lawless actions of rioters,” not to carry out an immigration enforcement mission. An ICE spokesperson echoed that sentiment in a separate email. Nonetheless, their mere presence was enough to set off shockwaves across undocumented and mixed-status families. And as Montes Cuevas’ experience shows, local police departments continue to work with ICE in certain cities across the country, turning any interaction with the cops into a potential crisis for undocumented immigrants. In Arizona, police and ICE have worked closely together for decades. In fact, many protesters in Phoenix last week not only demanded an end to police brutality but also urged the Phoenix Police Department to end its collaboration with ICE. 

“Attending a protest is such an individual choice, but it has very different consequences if you’re a citizen or not,” said Reyna Montoya, a DACA recipient and founder of Aliento, a nonprofit that provides art therapy to immigrant communities. “This is a very complicated, multi-layer situation…how do you make sure that, if you want to show solidarity and come out, that you’re not afraid of getting deported or potentially being sent to a detention center?”  

Like many in the immigrant rights movement, Montoya has seen the direct impact protests can make. In 2012, President Obama launched DACA in response to nationwide pressure from immigrant rights groups that took to the streets. In 2006, millions of people protested in massive marches pushing for immigration reform. Montoya was in high school then and remembers her parents telling her to stay home and study so they could march for the whole family. “Sometimes in marginalized communities [protesting] is all we have,” Montoya said. “Especially as an undocumented person or DACA, we don’t have the power to vote, so we’ve been able to rely on other tactics to be heard.” 

Montoya said she’s been having conversations with young people who “want to be there for our Black brothers and sisters who are being brutalized by the police at the moment,” and she understands the feeling of wanting to do something beyond posting on social media. “On the other hand, right now there are severe consequences,” she said. “People are being taken away from their cars even as they are leaving a peaceful protest. I’m legitimately very scared of the consequences for some of the DACA and undocumented students I work with.” 

The night Montes Cuevas was arrested, Máxima Guerrero, a local immigrant rights organizer with Puente Human Rights Movement, was also arrested as she was leaving. Sandra Castro Solis, who also works at Puente, said Guerrero was there as a legal observer, “making sure people’s First Amendment rights weren’t violated while protesting.” She expected to be confronted by militarized police, but she wasn’t expecting “arrests and charges to be so egregious that they would lead DACA recipients to be held by ICE,” or for people who weren’t even attending the protests to end up detained. 

Which is exactly what happened to Corina Paez and her boyfriend, Jesus Orona Prieto. They weren’t downtown to protest or even observe—they were simply on their way to dinner. (Arizona has been “open” for weeks now and has relatively lenient physical distancing rules.) Paez told me in a phone call last week that police also pulled them out of the car and arrested them for rioting, “even though I tried to explain to them that we weren’t doing anything.” Paez, a US citizen, was released the next morning, but Orona Preto doesn’t have DACA or other forms of legal immigration status. As of Wednesday, he remained in ICE custody at the Florence Correctional Center, a facility with 21 confirmed COVID-19 cases. 

Puente’s work has focused on getting people released from ICE custody, especially with the coronavirus pandemic continuing to spread in detention facilities. As soon as organizers heard about the arrests May 30, they started mobilizing. They made calls to ICE and to the mayor of Phoenix, demanding that the four people detained at the protest be released from custody. By June 1, three were let out, including Montes Cuevas.

Montes Cuevas was put on supervised released and has to wear an ankle monitor. “It feels like I’m a criminal when I’m not. It feels like I’ve done something so wrong or committed the biggest crime ever, and now I’m marked with this around my ankle,” he told me. “I can hide it with jeans, but it’s a bulk around my ankle. Someone can tell what it is. It’s summertime in Arizona, and we’re going to wear shorts and that’s what people look at first.”

He’ll have to check in with ICE, continue wearing the ankle monitor, and hire a lawyer to help him navigate what’s next. He fears that he may miss something and, because of a simple bureaucratic error, “they’re going to straight-up deport me for that.” Plus, if the charges from the protest aren’t dismissed, it could mean losing DACA and the protection from deportation that goes with it. (That same weekend a judge in Phoenix found that there was no probable cause for most of the more than 100 arrests from the night Montes Cuevas was arrested.) 

“It was something historic, so in a way I do not regret it,” Montes Cuevas told me when I asked if he wished he hadn’t gone to the protest. “But as much as I would like to protest—especially given my situation now seeing how unjust this all was—I would like to go, but I’m going to have to think about it twice.”

“I would love to tell people to be as free as Americans, to do what we feel is right, like protest, but it’s a scary situation.”

Tough day for racist autosport fans:

pic.twitter.com/gJkIfVf3Ba

— NASCAR (@NASCAR) June 10, 2020

The Confederate flag is a blood-stained testament to racism, slavery, and murder and it should forever and always be resigned to the bits of history where we keep Nazi swastikas and Klan hoods. It’s been a long time coming.

Following the lead of transit workers and agencies in Minneapolis, New York, and Boston, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (AKA Muni) announced yesterday that it would stop transporting cops to anti-police brutality protests: 

And 3. The SFMTA will no longer transport SFPD to anti-police brutality protests.

— SFMTA (@sfmta_muni) June 9, 2020

Today, the city’s police union, the San Francisco Police Officers Association, tweeted out a grumpy response that inadvertently made the case for rolling back some of the city’s police services, specifically, using cops to bust fare evaders and handle “problem passengers.” “Shouldn’t be a @SFPD officer’s job anyway,” it grumbled.

Hey Muni, lose our number next time you need officers for fare evasion enforcement or removing problem passengers from your buses and trains. Shouldn't be a @SFPD officer's job anyway. @SFPDChief should stop using us for this. https://t.co/ykOpzo4O4Y

— San Francisco POA (@SanFranciscoPOA) June 10, 2020

The SFPOA went on, “As city leaders demand cuts to SFPD, it needs to be clear what SFPD will no longer do.” Yup. That’s exactly the discussion that advocates of defunding and downsizing police departments have kicked off. Beyond the menacing snark, is San Francisco’s police union ready to have that conversation?  

So we’re all clear. As city leaders demand cuts to SFPD, it needs to be clear what SFPD will no longer do. If a ride on an out of service bus to ensure peaceful protests is too offensive, then don’t send us in to provide “security” services to catch fare jumpers.

— San Francisco POA (@SanFranciscoPOA) June 10, 2020

Less than a day after speaking at the funeral of his older brother, George Floyd—an unarmed black man who was killed by Minneapolis police—Philonise Floyd arrived on Capitol Hill to relive the same tragedy. On Wednesday morning, he was the first witness to offer testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, which held a hearing on policing and racism, largely in response to George’s Floyd’s death and the massive protests it sparked.

WATCH: Powerful testimony from Philonise Floyd, the brother of George Floyd, who was killed by Minneapolis police officers on May 25, 2020 before @HouseJudiciary for hearing on Policing Practices and Law Enforcement Accountability: pic.twitter.com/WAG7ftlPup

— House Judiciary Dems (@HouseJudiciary) June 10, 2020

Those protests have become a worldwide phenomenon, but that’s rarely the case when someone is killed by police. According the Washington Post, about 1,000 people are killed by police annually in the United States, including 463 so far in 2020. “I’m here to ask you to make it stop,” Philonise Floyd said.

For 5 minutes that went from stoic to emotional, Philonise Floyd spoke of the void left behind by his brother’s death—and of being “robbed” of the chance to say goodbye.

“I couldn’t take care of George that day he was killed,” Philonise Floyd said. “But maybe by speaking with you today, I can make sure that his death will not be in vain, to make sure that he’s more than another face on a t-shirt, more than another name on a list that won’t stop growing.”

Part of what made George Floyd’s death so powerful, Philonise Floyd pointed out, is also what made it so painful: Its entirety was captured on camera. “I can’t tell you the kind of pain you feel when you watch something like that,” he said. “When you watch your big brother, who you looked up to your whole entire life die? Die begging for his mom?”

Philonise Floyd called his brother a “gentle giant” who “didn’t deserve to die over $20.” During his his remarks, he also asked the committee to hold the police accountable for their role in the death of unarmed black men and to instill in law enforcement a sense of empathy and respect necessary for the institution to be a force of good. “The people marching in the streets are telling you, enough is enough,” he said.

As a final beat, Philonise Floyd turned to the power of legacy. His brother’s death has in some ways been immortalized in the annals of criminal justice, and it could come to mean even more—if Congress acts.

“George’s name means something. You have the opportunity here, today, to make your names mean something, too,” he said. “If his death ends up changing the world for the better, and I think it will, then he died as he lived. It is on you to make sure his death is not in vain.”