Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Five years ago, George Floyd, an African American, was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest made after a store clerk suspected Floyd had used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill and called the cops. When the cops arrived they pulled Floyd from his vehicle and during the arrest threw him to the ground, where officer Derek Chauvin put his knee into Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes 46 seconds and ignored pleas of “I can’t breathe” by the suspect. Floyd couldn’t breathe, and he died. The murder was captured on phone cameras by bystanders looking on in horror. Chauvin was not long thereafter charged with murder. Other officers standing around the arrest were also charged.

This incident drew significant global media attention. First in Minneapolis, then in other American cities, then in European and Asian cities, protests erupted, with citizens chanting Floyd’s name and/or shouting Black Lives Matter, and carrying signs. The BBC just recently ran a documentary of this incident and its global repercussions. Titled Backlash: The Murder of George Floyd, the documentary lucidly recalls those days of outrage, with the global protests making it clear that being Black is hazardous to your health. The last........

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