Michael Hanchard, chair and Gustave C. Kuemmerle Professor of Africana Studies and Director of the Marginalized Populations project, is a scholar in comparative politics with a focus in contemporary political theory, encompassing themes of nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and citizenship. His most recent book, “The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy,” won the 2019 Ralph J. Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association. Hanchard discusses on the wave of protests and the fight for equal rights and protections following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other unarmed Black women and men across the country.
These recent protests, Hanchard says, differ from past protests in that the new generation of youth are engaged. They “have been frustrated by the lack of federal response to the disparities in arrests, incarceration, and maiming and death of Black men and women in encounters with state and municipal police officers. The banality of many encounters between police and citizens—a traffic stop, someone allegedly attempting to pay for an item with a counterfeit $20 bill—helps foreground the disparities between Black, Brown, and white deaths at the hands—and knees—of police.”
Also, Hanchard says, a larger cross-section of the population are involved. “A striking aspect of the most recent uprisings in the U.S. in response to police violence is the extent of white youth involvement on the front lines of protest. In earlier periods of the Black freedom struggle, protest about issues such as police violence and domestic terror, Black women, men, and children bore the brunt of state violence.”
Today’s protests are a response not to individual acts of racism, Hanchard explains, but institutional and systemic racism. Millions of people marching against the murders of Black people by police are not marching against individual killings by racist cops, but a lack of equality in democracy itself.
“We must acknowledge that certain portions and segments of society have not experienced democracy in the same ways their white counterparts have. … The dynamic relationships between movements seeking radical change and those who want to preserve the status quo remind us that democracy, not just electoral but social and economic democracy, is something that often has to be fought over.”
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