The Uprisings of 2020

Image from the Washington Post’s “The Endless Call.”

What you’ll find below are articles – and some videos and podcasts mixed in – from leading scholars and activists weighing in on the uprisings sweeping the nation in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Before diving in, please take a moment to support the movement by donating to a bail fund, signing a petition, calling a representative, or sharing this resource so others can do so. Check out these Protest Safety Tips before you hit the streets. Also, for those getting your deeper reading on, here’s a list of Black Owned Bookstores you can support. See also these resources on Asian American and Latino solidarity with Black Lives Matter during this present moment, as well as these resources on White antiracist efforts.

#8toAbolition: An eight-step proposal to prison abolition.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Don’t understand the protests? What you’re seeing is people pushed to the edge.

Melina Abdullah & Alex Vitale (audio interview):What Racial Justice Protests Have Achieved, And What Activists And City Leaders Plan For The Future.

Abolition 101 (video.)

Abolition Journal: If You’re New to Abolition: Study Group Guide.

The Abusable Past: Reading Towards Abolition: A Reading List on Policing, Rebellion, and the Criminalization of Blackness.

Amna A. Akbar: How Defund and Disband Became the Demands.

Elizabeth Alexander: The Trayvon Generation.

Michelle Alexander: America, This is Your Chance: We Must Get it Right This Time Or Risk Losing Our Democracy Forever.

All Things Considered (podcast.) Less-Lethal Weapons That Are Actually Lethal.

Lauren Araiza: The historical alliance behind today’s Strike for Black Lives: A partnership between the Black Panther Party and the United Farm Workers paid off.

Emily Badger: Beverly Hills, Buckhead, SoHo: The New Sites of Urban Unrest. In a reflection of how American cities have changed since the 1960s, demonstrations have included many wealthy areas.

By Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui: Cities Grew Safer. Police Budgets Kept Growing.

Radley Balko: Correcting the misinformation about Breonna Taylor.

Simon Balto: How to Defund the Police: The inconvenient truth of police history in the United States is that police departments were not designed to keep a generic public safe.

Kim Barker & Jack Healy: Other Protests Flare and Fade. Why This Movement Already Seems Different.

Behind the Money podcast: A history of police funding.

Kathleen Belew (podcast interview): The Risk of The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.

Jonathan Ben-Menachem: Policing Can’t End Violence in the U.S., But Reparations Might.

Julia W. Bernier: Bail Funds, Buying Freedom, and a History of Abolition.

Michael Birnbaum, Chico Harlan, Loveday Morris: Protesters in Europe push for a new reckoning of their own countries’ racism.

Keisha N. Blain: Violence in Minneapolis is rooted in the history of racist policing in America: Police violence against African Americans has persisted for centuries.

Keisha N. Blain: A short history of black women and police violence.

Keisha N. Blain (podcast interview): The Rebellion in Defense of Black Lives Is Rooted in U.S. History. So, Too, Is Trump’s Authoritarian Rule.

Keisha N. Blain & Tom Zoellner: ‘Riots’, ‘mobs’, ‘chaos’: the establishment always frames change as dangerous.

Jamelle Bouie: The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It. It is an attack on civil society and democratic accountability.

Alex Brady: What is the fate of Black Lives Matter protest murals? The plywood that boarded up businesses became artwork, and there’s a move to preserve them before they’re discarded.

Mia Brett: Amy Cooper played the damsel in distress. That trope has a troubling history. Purportedly protecting white women has justified centuries of racist violence — while doing little to actually protect white women.

Luke Broadwater & Catie Edmondson: Police Groups Wield Strong Influence in Congress, Resisting the Strictest Reforms: Law enforcement groups, which have donated generously to members of both political parties, have dictated the terms of the debate on an overhaul, prodding lawmakers to reject the toughest measures.

Philip Bump: A dangerous new factor in an uneasy moment: Unidentified law enforcement officers.

Matthew Byrne: Police Departments Attempt a Charm Offensive Amid Uprisings: Kneeling in ‘solidarity’ with protestors is another attempt by police to gaslight people’s lived experiences of policing.

Albert Fox Cahn & Evan Selinger: Did you protest recently? Your face might be in a database: In the United States, at least one in four law enforcement agencies are able to use facial recognition technology. The implications are troubling.

Campaign Zero. (Policy solutions. See also #8toAbolition.)

Vivien Chang: Black Lives Matter now represents America’s best ambassadors: Anti-racism is a global movement.

Erica Chenoweth & Jeremy Pressman: This summer’s Black Lives Matter protesters were overwhelmingly peaceful, our research finds: Police and counterprotesters sometimes started violence.

Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman, & Lara Putnam: The Floyd protests are the broadest in U.S. history — and are spreading to white, small-town America: That will influence the election — and future policy.

Jelani Cobb, Errin Haines, Rachelle Hampton, Alex Samuels, & Carvell Wallace: “White People Don’t Respond to Our Pain; They Respond to Theirs”: What it’s really like to be a Black journalist in America.

Aaron Ross Coleman: The devaluing of black property has led to the devaluing of black lives: Andre Perry on how lenders and home appraisers contributed to this moment in the fight against racism.

Brittney Cooper: Why Are Black Women and Girls Still an Afterthought in Our Outrage Over Police Violence?

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw: The Unmattering of Black Lives: In the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, we see that the violence of the past is the violence of the present.

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw: Fear of a Black Uprising: Confronting the white pathologies that shape racist policing.

Isabel Cristo: Policing Doesn’t Protect Women: As abolitionist frameworks enter the mainstream, addressing gendered and sexual violence is treated like a conceptual trap. It’s not.

Angela Davis (video.) This moment holds possibilities for change we have never before experienced.

Matthew F. Delmont: Changing hearts and minds won’t stop police violence: The way Americans have long discussed racism is a huge part of the problem.

Mustafa Dikeç: Rage and Uprising: A politics of rage does not equate emotions with irrationality or impulsive behavior, but can affirm equality, claim agency, and ask for justice.

Mary L. Dudziak: The Damage Trump Has Done This Week Extends Far Beyond America’s Borders: Sixty-three years ago, American troops were deployed to quell racial unrest. It made this country a better place.

Maya Dukmasova: Abolish the police? Organizers say it’s less crazy than it sounds. Grassroots groups around Chicago are already putting abolitionist ideas into practice.

Laura Edwards: The Constitution demands police accountability: Protesters have a right to oversight on police powers.

Woods Ervin (interview.) How Would Prison Abolition Actually Work? As the idea of prison abolition increasingly enters the mainstream discourse, GQ interviews an organizer within the movement.

Eve L. Ewing: Blue Bloods: America’s Brotherhood of Police Officers. To understand the citadel of law enforcement, we must reckon with its unions—which resemble fraternities more than labor unions.

Thomas Faith: The long history of chemical weapons in civilian law enforcement: How the military brought tear gas from World War I battlefields to U.S. law enforcement.

Garrett Felber: The Struggle to Abolish the Police Is Not New: Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists. Understanding why can help us ask for change in our own time.

Max Felker-Kantor: Police Have Long History of Responding to Black Movements by Playing the Victim.

Max Felker-Kantor, interviewed by Alex Vitale. (Video.)

Megan Ming Francis: Reimagining Justice: A Primer on Defunding the Police and Prison Abolition.

Lauren Frayer: India Sees A Change Sparked By Black Lives Matter Movement.

Ashley Garcia: Seattle’s protest is the latest in a long history of experimental living: The CHAZ, or CHOP, presents an alternative vision for American life.

Lorgia García-Peña & Mordecai Lyon: Decolonizing the University: In this interview, Lorgia García-Peña, who was denied tenure by Harvard in late 2019, discusses why ethnic studies has never been more urgent and the important role it can play in protest.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff & Eric Schmitt: Pentagon Ordered National Guard Helicopters’ Aggressive Response in D.C. The high-profile episode, after days of protests in Washington, was a turning point in the military’s response to unrest in the city.

Caitlin Gibson: ‘I was her shadow’: As millions cry for justice, Breonna Taylor’s sister faces her own quiet grief.

Michelle Goldberg: America Is a Tinderbox: Scenes from a country in free fall.

Hallie Golden: ‘It haunts your life’: California’s legacy of police violence against Native American women: Amid a reckoning over police brutality against Black Americans, Native women are speaking out about their experiences.

Rigoberto González: The Privilege of the Ally: Allies can be powerful aides to social justice movements—but it is their responsibility to make sure they don’t become a distraction from the cause.

Sage Goodwin: Urban uprisings highlight the need for more journalists of color in newsrooms: Black journalists will help erode racial stereotypes perpetrated by the media.

Robert Greene II: We Are Living in a Red Spring.

Eliza Griswold: A Community Organizer Takes on White Vigilantism.

Matthew Guariglia: Buffalo police pushed an old man — but said he tripped. Because police lie. The police as an institution is not fair, balanced or objective. And yet departments are still relied upon to be the arbiters of what did and did not happen.

Grace Elizabeth Hale: The link between the video of Ahmaud Arbery’s death and lynching photos: How lynching images create complicity.

Amy Harmon and Sabrina Tavernise: One Big Difference About George Floyd Protests: Many White Faces.

Jeet Heer: The Fire This Time: The insurrection against racist policing has deep roots in America’s past but also points toward a different future.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez, D.D. Guttenplan, and Zoë Carpenter: Defund—and Disarm—the Police.

Micah Herskind & Reina Sultan: What Is Abolition, And Why Do We Need It?

Marc Lamont Hill (book): We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest, and Possibility.

Elizabeth Hinton: The Minneapolis Uprising in Context: A proper understanding of urban rebellion depends on our ability to interpret it not as a wave of criminality, but as political violence.

Elizabeth Hinton: George Floyd’s Death Is a Failure of Generations of Leadership: Policymakers in the 1960s had the answers — give political and economic power to the people — but walked away.

Mary Hooks and Jocelyn Simonson: The Power of Community Bail Funds: They help keep people’s lives from being ruined by exorbitant bail. Efforts to thwart these funds are the true public safety threats.

Sherrilyn Ifill: How to Change Policing in America.

Matthew Impelli: 54 Percent of Americans Think Burning Down Minneapolis Police Precinct Was Justified After George Floyd’s Death.

Interrupting Criminalization: #DefundPolice Toolkit.

Kellie Carter Jackson: The Double Standard of the American Riot: The nationwide protests against police killings have been called un-American by critics, but rebellion has always been used to defend liberty.

Jim Crow of the North: Full-Length Documentary on the history of racism in Minnesota.

Saeed Jones: Whose Grief? Our Grief: For Saeed Jones, generations collapse into seconds during an American week of chaos and sorrow.

Mariame Kaba: Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police: Because reform won’t happen.

Kaepernick Publishing: Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future Without Policing & Prisons.

Robin D. G. Kelley: What Kind of Society Values Property Over Black Lives? The hackneyed emphasis on “Why loot?” obscures the question, which black people have asked for centuries.

Robin D. G. Kelley: Black History in Three Acts: The story of how black people confront systems of racial capitalism and plot world liberation. A reading list from Robin D. G. Kelley.

Robin D.G. Kelley: video interview on Democracy Now!

Robin D.G. Kelley: podcast interview, The Banality of Evil and the Murder of George Floyd.

Kim Kelly: Police Unions: What to Know and Why They Don’t Belong in the Labor Movement.

Meg Kelly, Joyce Sohyun Lee, & Jon Swaine: Partially blinded by police: Eight people suffered severe eye injuries at protests across the country on May 30. In three instances, video evidence undermines official accounts of what happened.

Ibram X. Kendi: Who Gets to Be Afraid in America? Americans don’t see me, or Ahmaud Arbery, running down the road—they see their fear.

Ibram X. Kendi: The American Nightmare: To be black and conscious of anti-black racism is to stare into the mirror of your own extinction.

Yoonj Kim: What ‘Defund The Police’ Means (And Doesn’t Mean) And Where It Came From: Its origins offer crucial insights about America’s current cultural landscape.

Kevin Kruse: Twitter thread on the history of police riots, with lots of primary sources.

K.K. Rebecca Lai, Bill Marsh, & Anjali Singhvi: Here Are the 98 U.S. Cities Where Protesters Were Tear-Gassed.

Sean Larson: The Abolitionist Road to Socialism.

Victoria Law: Against Carceral Feminism.

Courtney Linder: Why Hundreds of Mathematicians Are Boycotting Predictive Policing: Some academics are calling the controversial practice a “scientific veneer for racism.”

Heather Long & Andrew Van Dam: The black-white economic divide is as wide as it was in 1968: 14 charts show how deep the economic gap is and how little it has changed in decades. The covid-19 recession is also hitting black families and business owners far harder than whites.

Wesley Lowery: A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists: What’s different, in this moment, is that the editors of our country’s most esteemed outlets no longer hold a monopoly on publishing power.

Wesley Lowery: Police Reform Won’t Stop Another George Floyd from Being Murdered.

Mapping Police Violence.

Austin McCoy: Defund the Police: Protest Slogans and the Terms for Debate.

Austin McCoy: The Struggle Against Police Is International. Our Solidarity Must Be Global.

Philip V. McHarris: Why does the Minneapolis police department look like a military unit? The history of how local police departments got so much military-grade gear.

Brie McLemore: Defunding the Police Is Not the End Goal. It’s the First Step.

Tracey Meares: How the Federal Government Can Reform the Police.

Cassandra Mensah: If We Abolish Police, What Happens to Rapists? Without police, what do we do about the rapists and abusers? Here’s the answer.

Brentin Mock: How Cities Offload the Cost of Police Brutality: Cities spend tens of millions of dollars on lawsuits over police violence and killings. But municipalities are effectively using residents to mortgage the cost.

David Montgomery: The Endless Call: Demands for racial equity and justice have always been part of the American story. While the images here span the past two weeks, the words paired with them span the past 100 years.

Nick Mottern: Over 1,100 Policing Agencies in the US Have Bought Drones Capable of Recording.

Sisonke Msimang: Black Lives Matter, Wherever They Are: Western leaders are beginning to criticize Trump’s handling of race issues, but they have much to answer for.

Naomi Murakawa: Police Reform Works — For the Police: Decades of reform have built an agile, deadly force that pushes millions of people into the largest carceral system in the world.

Mary-Elizabeth Murphy: Black women are the victims of police violence, too: Breonna Taylor’s case isn’t unusual.

Melanie Newport: Bail funds are having a moment in 2020: But today’s activism reflects longstanding commitments to freedom.

New York Times: From Cosmetics to NASCAR, Calls for Racial Justice Are Spreading: What started as a renewed push for police reform has now touched seemingly every aspect of American life.

New York Times: How Black Lives Matter Reached Every Corner of America.

Anna North: How racist policing took over American cities, explained by a historian: “The problem is the way policing was built,” historian Khalil Muhammad says.

Margaret O’Mara: Historians on the 2020 Protests.

Margaret O’Mara: Don’t Be Fooled by Seattle’s Police-Free Zone: The city looks progressive but has a history of racism and exclusion. This could be a turning point.

Lonnae O’Neal: George Floyd’s mother was not there, but he used her as a sacred invocation: With his dying breaths, Floyd called for her as an assurance of memory.

Nana Osei-Opare: Around the world, the U.S. has long been a symbol of anti-black racism: Today’s global protests against racism in the U.S. have a long history.

Sarah Parcak: (in which an Egyptologist gives advice on how crowds can remove monuments with simple tools.)

Jon Parton: Minnesota Officials Link Arrested Looters to ‘White Supremacist’ Groups.

Michelle S. Phelps: Dismantling the Minneapolis Police Department.

Katrina Phillips: Longtime police brutality drove American Indians to join the George Floyd protests: Who were the American Indian Movement activists at the Minneapolis protests?

Jessica Pishko: The Defund Movement Aims to Change the Policing and Prosecution of Domestic Violence: Though domestic violence is often cited as a reason to maintain the carceral status quo, advocates say there are more humane—and effective—alternatives.

Daniel Politi: Activists Create Public Online Spreadsheet of Police Violence Videos.

Poor & Working Class Survivors For Black lives: White Women for Defunding the Police.

Poor People’s Campaign: Open Letter to Our Nations’ Lawmakers on Systemic Racism.

ProPublica: We Are Tracking What Happens to Police After They Use Force on Protestors: These 68 videos show clear apparent instances of police officers escalating violence during protests. Most departments refused to share details about investigations and discipline or even officers’ names. Here’s what we learned about each case.

Gwen Prowse & Vesla Mae Weaver: How a 50-year-old report predicted America’s current racial reckoning: The 1968 government-sponsored report reveals that demands from activists around policing are nothing new.

Derecka Purnell: How I Became a Police Abolitionist: When people dismiss abolitionists for not caring about victims or safety, they tend to forget that we are those victims, those survivors of violence.

Ryan J. Reilly: Law Enforcement Seized Masks Meant To Protect Anti-Racist Protesters From COVID-19. The masks, reading “Stop killing Black people,” were meant to quell the spread of the coronavirus, which has disproportionately affected Black Americans.

Benjy Renton: Tear gas traces its roots back to Middlebury.

Edwin Rios: How Black Oaklanders Finally Expelled the School Police.

Melvin Rogers: We Should Be Afraid, But Not of Protesters. The rage on display in Minneapolis is not only about police violence. It is also about the country’s utter disregard for the pain of black Americans.

Charlotte Rosen: Abolition or Bust: Liberal Police Reform as an Engine of Carceral Violence.

CedarBough Saeji: The K-pop revolution and what it means for American politics: The unique fan culture tied to Korean pop music is rocking American politics.

Scholars for Social Justice: The Fire This Time: These protests are too widespread to go away. There will be no peace without justice on multiple fronts.

Stuart Schrader: Police Reform Won’t Fix a System That Was Built to Abuse Power: The history of American policing shows that it was designed to eat up resources and subjugate the civilian population.

Stuart Schrader: Wanted: An End to Police Terror.

Stuart Schrader: Police Departments Are Parasites on the Public Purse.

Stuart Schrader: When police treat protesters like insurgents, sending in troops seems logical: Militarized police forces laid the groundwork for using troops to quell protest.

Stuart Schrader: What defunding the police can mean for US foreign policy.

Stuart Schrader (audio interview): How Empire is an Accomplice to the Murder of George Floyd.

A. Brad Schwartz: The best guide for how — and how not — to reform police? Eliot Ness. One of America’s most famous law officers tried some of the very measures being proposed today.

Science Friday (podcast): Research Shows Peaceful Protest Depends On Police Behavior.

Amanda Seligman: helpful Twitter thread for thinking about rebellions/uprisings/ civil disorders.

Patrick Sharkey: helpful thread from a sociologist providing deep structural context for the current moment. Links to resources on urban inequality and connections to policing.

Jocelyn Simonson: Power over Policing: Reform efforts will fail. Only a power shift to communities can improve public safety.

Sahil Singhvi: Disturbing Parallels in Crackdowns on Protesters in the U.S. and Hong Kong.

Jamil Smith: The Power of Black Lives Matter: How the movement that’s changing America was built and where it goes next.

Rebecca Solnit: The Slow Road to Sudden Change: On the Decades of Activism That Leads to Historic Change.

Nicole Sperling: ‘Cops,’ Long-Running Reality Show That Glorified Police, Is Canceled. The show’s 33rd season was expected to premiere on the Paramount Network on June 15.

Tyina Steptoe: Hip-hop is the soundtrack to Black Lives Matter protests, continuing a tradition that dates back to the blues.

Story Corps: Talking About the Murder of George Floyd & the Black Lives Matter Demonstrations.

Valerie Strauss: Resources to teach the history of policing in America that you won’t find in textbooks.

Study & Struggle (political education organization.)

Thomas J. Sugrue: 2020 is not 1968: To understand today’s protests, you must look further back. The conflicts of 2020 aren’t just a repeat of past troubles; they’re a new development in the American fight for racial equality.

Thomas J. Sugrue: Stop comparing today’s protests to 1968: There are superficial similarities, but what we’re seeing now is something completely new.

Reina Sultan:How Transformative Justice Responds To Violence Without The Carceral System.