George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis policeman ended a two-month period of induced quietude due to the pandemic, and it marked the resumption of an age of turbulence and revolt. The protests that erupted after the incident, often attended by violence and destruction, should appear familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the world over the last decade. From Paris to Hong Kong, from Mogadishu to Bogotá, an unruly public has been on the march against governments of every description. The Covid-19 lockdown was a lid placed on this sociopolitical cauldron. Pressure was released, explosively, the instant the lid was cracked open.
The current unrest had an immediate trigger and responded to a specific grievance about racial injustice and police misbehavior. It also connected to something bigger and deeper: the tectonic collision between a public empowered by digital platforms and the elites who control the ruling institutions of modern society. George Floyd’s brutal killing, coldly considered, can be interpreted in different ways. Why have so many come to perceive it as a call to action? How did a local instance of apparent police inhumanity expand, with vertiginous speed, into a street revolt that has absorbed the attention of the country and the world?
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