Daily Archives: February 1, 2022

You may have heard lots of people using the phrase 'Black Lives Matter' in recent times.

It's a statement which has become an important way for people to show their support for members of the black community who have experienced discrimination simply because of the colour of their skin.

How did 'Black Lives Matter' start?

'Black Lives Matter' has become an important statement phrase for many following the death of an African-American man called George Floyd, But it was first used widely back in 2013 after a teenage boy called Trayvon Martin was killed by a neighbourhood watch volunteer who did not face any punishment.

Nobody involved in the Black Lives Matter movement is saying that only black lives matter, or that all lives don't matter, or that white lives don't matter.

Lots of people took part in protests following Trayvon's death and many turned to social media to speak out against what had happened.

They felt upset about the injustice that was taking place in America and wanted to express their anger that that the lives of black people did not have the same value as other people's lives. This led to the birth of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.

Since then, as well as a phrase of support, Black Lives Matter has grown into a campaigning organisation too.

Ged Grebby is the chief executive of the charity Show Racism The Red Card, he told Newsround that the Black Lives Matter movement was established in reaction to black people in the US being over three times more likely than white people to be killed by a police officer, according to figures published by the American Journal of Public Health.

"It is a movement for equality and against racism" he said.

The police brutality that was happening made black people feel "their lives simply did not matter" says ex-footballer and honorary president of Show Racism The Red Card, Shaka Hislop.

Since the events of 2013, more incidents have taken place across America and other parts of the world which have led to increasing calls for the protection of black lives.

The discrimination black people face dates all the way back to slavery and colonialism and many charities and campaign groups have been challenging racial inequality for years. However, racism still affects many black people today.

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What about the phrase 'All Lives Matter'?

Some people have been using the phrase 'All Lives Matter' in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.

On the surface, it seems to suggest that people should be united. However, it's still viewed by many campaigners as a problematic statement. This is because it's seen to take away from the important issues that are affecting black lives in a bad way, and which need to be addressed.

"Nobody involved in the Black Lives Matter movement is saying that only black lives matter, or that all lives don't matter, or that white lives don't matter. The issue is that is white lives have always seemed to matter more," Shaka Hislop explained.

"What Black Lives Matter as a movement is saying is that all those lives matter equally. Black lives have to matter just as much as everybody else's."

This is a belief held by many other organisations working to hard to tackle racial discrimination including the charity Stand Up To Racism.

"The reason Stand Up To Racism and so many people are saying 'Black Lives Matter' right now is because for a very long time, black people in America, Britain and many other places have been treated so badly by people with power, we have to speak up and say that black people do not deserve to be treated this way," said Sabby Dhalu from the organisation.

"Saying black people deserve to be treated better isn't saying anyone else should be treated worse. But sadly, for many reasons, some people are happy for this injustice to continue, so they say things like 'white lives matter' or 'all lives matter' to take our attention away."

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Anti-racism: What does the phrase 'Black Lives Matter' mean ...

A gathering at Greater St. Marks Family Church in St. Louis on August 12, 2012, to discuss Michael Browns death. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

This aint your grandparents civil-rights movement! Rapper Tef Poe yelled from the stage of the Chaifetz Arena in St. Louis on October 12, 2014. Several of us stood in solidarity and turned our backs on the religious leaders who organized the rally in the wake of Michael Browns killing at the hands of white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. The Black church, once the moral compass of African American politics, would not lead this new generation of protest.

But the exodus from church is not a flight from faith. It is an escape from the bondage of patriarchy, queer-antagonism, and respectability politics that have long plagued the religious terrain. Activists are embracing other pathways through the wilderness of racial oppression. We are leaving in search of a practice[s] that is overtly inclusive of our sexuality, ancestral practices, and race, Meagan Jordan wrote for the Black Youth Project. While we may not be going to church in the traditional sense, we are gathering together in unique spaces.

Jordan invites us to question the question: Where is the church in Black Lives Matter? What if, in our search for the church, we miss the spirit erupting beyond its walls?

On August 9, 2014, just hours after Mike Browns killing in Ferguson, Missouri, local residents adorned the stretch of Canfield Drive where the teenagers lifeless body lay face down for over four hours. Many brought flowers, candles, teddy bears, balloons, cards, and photographs. Some poured out liquor and placed the empty bottles between bouquets and baseball caps. Others paid their respects with prayer or a moment of silence.

As protests exploded across the country, the makeshift memorial blossomed into a beloved community. Activists planted signs that read Hands Up Dont Shoot and End Police Brutality! Vigils around the shrine sparked actions across the city. Mourners stood silently for four and a half minutes to symbolize the four and a half hours that the police left Mikes bleeding body on the street, baking in the summer sun. Mothers wept. Healers burned sage. Protesters formed circles, joined hands, and chanted Black lives matter and Mike Brown means we got to fight back!

The street memorial was a sacred place of political struggle. And it embodied the spiritual life of contemporary activism.

Black Lives Matter is spiritually promiscuous. It embraces a range of rituals: ancestral worship, call-and-response, chanting, libation, prayer, mysticism, the lighting of incense. Each does its own work. Chanting releases rage. Prayer offers comfort. Magic possesses the dispossessed with faith in the miraculous. Call-and-response turns a Lil Boosie song into a movement anthem. Libation transforms Hennessy into holy water. And all articulate a refusal to give death the last word. It is a makeshift spiritual practice rooted in a love of justice and a reverence for the sanctity of Black lives.

In Toni Morrisons novel Beloved, a stunning scene unfolds when a community of freedmen and former slaves assembles in the woods. After a moment of prayer, Baby Suggs slams her stick on the ground and beckons everyone to let loose. A frenzy ensues. Children laugh. Men dance. Women wail. And, before long, their twisting hips and roaring laughter and salty tears melt into an ecstatic choreography of praise and protest. After the earth settles, Baby Suggs the 70-year-old unchurched preacher addresses the multitude who, every Saturday afternoon, carry their scarred backs and calloused hands into the clearing. Here, she said, in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.

The sermon is short and the message is clear: Only love can save us.

The ring shout, as Morrison masterfully depicts it, is among the earliest forms of African American resistance. A remix of African religions and Black Christianity, the shout! was a spiritual triumph where enslaved and free Blacks stole away in back woods and danced counterclockwise, as the ring leaders voice thundered into the night and the groups collective voice hollered back. Facing the evil of chattel slavery, without redress from the courts or access to the classroom, Black folk created religious rituals to seek solace, honor ancestors, assert a sense of self-regard, and dream of better days.

The ring shout was a circle of life drawn from the shadows of death.

The ritual faded as Black religion in America formalized. But its essential elements echo throughout African American music, dance, religion, and activism. Just spin the records of Sarah Vaughan, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Billie Holiday, Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar, and Young Thug, and youll hear the rhapsodic sorrow of the blues, the improvisational genius of jazz, the supreme virtuosity of hip-hop, and a trap rapper mumbling his way through the tradition. Or attend Sunday service at a Black church and glimpse the Holy Ghost enchanting the feet of elders as the preacher cries out for a witness. Or join a protest against racial violence and let the shout ring through your body.

This is my testimony. In the middle of Canfield Drive, standing at Mikes memorial, I got lost in the ring. As protesters chanted and loved ones lit candles and strangers became comrades and a community gathered to mourn and rebel, I was possessed with the spirit of freedom and the truth that another world is possible. And, as Baby Suggs demanded, I loved it. I loved it hard.

Ferguson exploded two months after I graduated from seminary, and I felt called to do something. Following the legacy of the 1961 Freedom Rides to challenge racial segregation, activists Darnell Moore, Patrisse Cullors, and others organized Black Life Matters Freedom Rides from over 12 cities to help turn a local rebellion into a national movement. Eager to turn up, I got on a bus from New York City to St. Louis. Twenty-one hours later, 42 of us arrived at St. Johns United Church of Christ.

We used the sanctuary to conduct teach-ins, strategize campaigns, and prepare for acts of civil disobedience. Several of us slept in the basement where we shared stories of what brought us to Ferguson. Perhaps owing to the setting, some protesters talked about their experiences in church. Many of us had been harmed by pastors and parishioners that professed to love all of Gods children. We knew that a place of refuge for some could be a site of repression for others. And that Black liberation not only requires protesting police violence in the streets and systemic racism throughout society. It means confronting the violence of policing women, queer people, and Black youth in the church and throughout our communities.

For decades, Black preachers have sought to redeem the soul of the country. A new generation of activists is reckoning with the soul of the church. And herein lies the spiritual force of the movement. It calls us to confront the ways we have sinned against each other as we protest the ways others have sinned against us. The need for actions, campaigns, and policy changes while vital for the success of social movements can eclipse the need for what the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called a revolution of values. As important as politics may be: An ethic of love guides us to our North Star.

This is what connects Baby Suggs to Black Lives Matter. Beyond calls to transform a loveless society, both demand that we embody a love that will transform each other. The two make a road we can all travel. To change the world we must remake ourselves and to change ourselves we must remake the world. This is hard work. Most of us will fall short. But if we journey together, we can reach heights even in the valley of death.

I stopped by the memorial before we left Ferguson. The heat was merciless. I imagined Big Mikes body sprawled in the street, blood dripping from his head, as neighbors watched in horror. I thought about Lezley McSpadden, who will spend her holidays grieving her most precious gift. I mourned the days Mike will not see and the secrets he will never have the chance to share.

And as the sun rose and my heart sank into my chest, a small crowd began to assemble. A few people lit candles. Some replaced soiled teddy bears and handed out water, while others stood in silence. Many of us wept. And after a few moments, we all joined hands and formed a circle around the shrine. Children, elders, parents, protesters, clergy, residents, out-of-towners, queer organizers, white activists, Black kids from the neighborhood. It felt like an altar call. Except salvation was not about joining a church or having faith in a higher power. It was about believing that every life is holy and joining a movement that protects the living while mourning the dead.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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The Religion of Protest: Finding Spirituality in BLM - The Cut

DEKALB COUNTY, GAThe second annual Black Lives Matter at DeKalb Schools Week of Action kicked off today, Jan. 31, and will be held virtually through Feb. 4, in the DeKalb County School District (DCSD). The week-long event features daily Black Lives Matter school-based instructional activities, including a social media celebration of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and a celebration of Black-owned businesses in DeKalb County.

An array of dynamic speakers and topics has been curated around this years theme, Celebrating Black Contributions to America. The virtual symposium will include speakers and topics for individuals to engage in and learn more about African Americans impact in America. Some of those sessions include African American History & Heritage, Black People and STE(A)M, Mental Wellness in Black Communities, Wealth Equity in the Black Community, and Unbalanced Judicial and Legislative Systems.

After our success in 2020, were excited to host once again a week that celebrates the beautiful diversity in DeKalb County School District, Superintendent Cheryl Watson-Harris said. Black Lives Matter at DeKalb Schools Week of Action 2022 gives our scholars and staff an opportunity to recognize racial and social injustices in our communities, but also a platform to celebrate our wonderful achievements.

Black Lives Matter began as a social media hashtag in 2013 in response to the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch coordinator in Sanford, Fla. The social media movement transformed into a global organization with the goal to build power to bring justice, healing, and freedom to Black people across the globe. The Board of Education adopted the resolution for Black Lives Matter at DeKalb Schools Week of Action on July 13, 2020.

I am proud to be a part of a district that encourages courageous conversations concerning systemic racism, racial injustice, ethnic bias, and so much more. The DCSD Black Lives Matter Week of Action showcases great discussions and equips our students to be the voice of change. Im excited that we are equipping our scholars with the tools they need to address stereotypes and stigmas so that they can reach their fullest potential, DeKalb County Board of Education Vice Chair Diijon DaCosta said.

For more information on Black Lives Matter At DeKalb Schools Week of Action 2022, visithttps://www.dekalbschoolsga.org/news/black-lives-matter-at-dekalb-schools/.

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DCSD hosts Black Lives Matter Week of Action 2022 - On Common Ground News

Arthur Ashe Monument in Richmond, Virginia, on June 17, 2020. Photo: Kris Graves c/o Sasha Wolf Projects

Between 7:06 and 7:11 p.m. on June 1, 2020, equipped only with a Bible and the long, muscular arm of history, Donald Trump became a hero.

As fumes from the chemical compound approved by his accomplices officials from the Secret Service; the U.S. Park Police; the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department; the D.C. National Guard; the Federal Bureau of Prisons; the U.S. Marshals Service; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; the attorney general of the United States; and the top two commanders of the mightiest military force on the planet began to irritate the eyes, throats, lungs, and skin of nonviolent protesters, the conquering hero posed in front of St. Johns Episcopal Church and hoisted a Bible to the heavens. The president of the United States had just tear-gassed his own peacefully protesting citizens for a photo op. But Trump treated this chaos as if it were the final panel of a historically accurate graphic novel.

For what is America if not an epic story? We have all absorbed, to varying degrees, the basic premise and plot of the great American tall tale. Once upon a time, an innocent group of freedoms-loving people were minding their own business enjoying their freedoms (freedoms is always with an s). Out of nowhere a dark force of freedoms-hating others arose, threatening to steal the peace, tranquillity, and stuff the spunky freedoms-lovers had built with nothing but hard work, ingenuity, and definitely no help from the others. There was only one choice: They had to eliminate the threat posed by the others.

In this myth, Black Lives Matter is simply the youngest descendant of a foe that has bedeviled America since before there was an America, and the Dylann Roofs of this world are the heirs of a long line of white people who have taken up the mantle of violent, deadly anti-Blackness in defense of this American myth.

Attaching oneself to Black peoples desire to be free, equal, or even human has always been seen as a seditious act worthy of violent retribution. At the beginning of the American experiment, it was literally unconstitutional: The Federal Constitution therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views them in the mixt character of persons and of property, wrote hero, Father of the Constitution, and human trafficker James Madison when debating the value of Black lives in Federalist Paper No. 54. This is in fact their true character. It is the character bestowed on them by the laws under which they live; and it will not be denied.

Even the idea of Black lives mattering was the enemy of this America. In the prequel to our current story, both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were communists bent on a violent overthrow of the American government. So were W.E.B. Du Bois, the Black Panthers, the Freedom Riders, and every Black person who organized a peaceful coalition. In our current chapter, kneeling silently before a football game begins is as much a riot as marching in the streets, and Trumps impromptu tear-gas photo op was simply a throwback to George Wallace sending state troopers to bar Black students from integrating the University of Alabama.

How can you render this tale so that the so-called villains perspective is understood or perhaps embraced? You cant. Not a single Black movement in the history of this country has been universally supported by lawmakers, law enforcers, and white people. You are free to believe that Black people are worthy of their humanity and liberty, but doing something about it means accepting the violent backlash and the collective scorn of a country whose Constitution calculated the value of a Black life at 60 percent of a white one.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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The Lure of White Martyrdom - New York Magazine

The Brooklyn Liberations Protect Trans Youth rally at the Brooklyn Museum on June 13, 2021. Photo: Michael M. Santiago / GettyImages/Getty Images

Let today be the last day that you ever doubt Black trans power, I cried into a microphone in the summer of 2020. I was addressing a crowd of nearly 15,000 people dressed in varying shades of white outside the Brooklyn Museum. Our uniform paid homage to a 1917 NAACP silent march for Black lynching victims. Now, more than a century later, we had gathered to honor the Black transgender people murdered during the coronavirus pandemic and before it. We chanted the often overlooked names of folks like Layleen Polanco, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, Dominique Remmie Fells, and Riah Milton. We imagined a world where Black trans people didnt have to fight so hard to exist.

The Black Trans Lives Matter rally sprang from the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd, but the movement is anything but new. Since the emergence of BLM, trans organizers had been building a national network to combat discrimination and violence in our communities. A month after a verdict was reached in the George Zimmerman case, New York activists mobilized around the killing of a Black trans woman named Islan Nettles on the streets of Harlem. You can find work like this happening in every corner of the country groups like the New Orleansbased House of Tulip, a collective committed to finding long-term housing for those who need it, or Atlantas Solutions NOT Punishment Collaborative, which supports the political education of trans people. In the spirit of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnsons historic STAR House, the Knights & Orchids Society in Selma, Alabama, takes a holistic approach, helping Black trans and queer people access food and gender-affirming health care, among other basic human needs.

The past few years have been complicated. Ive never felt more connected to the Black trans community and more disconnected from the wider population, which so often ignores our struggles. With each passing year, we reach record new highs of murders in our communities. But we continue to fight. And that day in the summer of 2020 will forever serve as a bridge between the rich history of the Black trans movement and a more liberated future.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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Black Trans Lives Matter and the Cry to Be Included - The Cut

Activist Ieshia Evans in July 2016, in Louisiana. Photo: Jonathan Bachman/REUTERS

In 1892, at the height of the lynching crisis, Ida B. Wells proclaimed that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.

The critical point for me in Wellss manifesto for Black self-defense is not her overarching respect for the power of guns. It is her observation about where the aggression begins. Losing that thread of the argument, about who actually starts the fights, is the reason so much white aggression is seamlessly restyled as the right to stand ones ground, to protect and defend ones kith and kin. Conversely, Black self-defense is transposed into an act of unjustified aggression and met with fire and fury by both the state and self-deputized white citizens.

Do Black people have the right to defend themselves against acts of hostility and aggression, especially when the aggressors are white? When confronted with increasingly normalized acts of white aggression, do Black people have the right to stand our ground?

Philando Castile told the officer who pulled him over for a traffic stop that he had a firearm, which he had a permit for. The officer killed him anyway. In 2014, police killed John Crawford III inside an Ohio Walmart for aimlessly carrying an air rifle that was sold in the store, perhaps considering whether he wanted to buy it. And certainly, Tamir Rice is one of the youngest victims of our cultures excessive fear of Black men and boys with guns, even though his was a toy and he was only 12.

The answer to white aggression cannot, under these circumstances, be more guns. But the decade since Trayvon Martins death has been marked by exactly this: more guns. Firearm sales broke records in the Obama era and exceeded that pre-pandemic record last year. While African American gun ownership has increased, the vast majority of folks hyperexercising their Second Amendment rights are white people who use the language of self-defense, safety, and protection as the excuse to stockpile guns.

One wonders if they are not readying themselves for a war. Dylann Roof told officers that he wanted to start a race war when he slaughtered nine worshipping souls in a South Carolina church. One wonders if his singular attack, together with the collective attempt at insurrection on January 6, 2021, is a dress rehearsal. It seems Black people are considered the enemy. Unrest and disease are in the air. And the aggressors, the neighborhood warmongers, have restyled themselves as the ones under attack, as the ones needing protection.

And so, as has happened after every major moment of racial upheaval, African Americans have forged a politics of Black self-defense. Although the country loves to tout the nonviolent direct action of the King years, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, founded in Jonesboro, Louisiana, a small town about 20 minutes from where I grew up, rejected nonviolence as praxis. These World War II veterans carried guns and defended their homes and communities. So too did the Black Power eras most iconic group call itself the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. In Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2020, when a group of activists gathered to peacefully protest a persisting Confederate monument in town, they were intimidated by an armed biker militia group; in response, members of an area Black gun club showed up to protect the peaceful demonstrators. These local skirmishes, often in places with long and storied Confederate histories, are becoming increasingly volatile theaters in an increasingly tactical era of the U.S. gun-culture wars.

In the broader movement, however, the language has shifted from self-defense to public safety and protection, perhaps because this language is, in a word, safer. When the Black Panther Party defended its right to armed self-defense, the U.S. government responded by characterizing the group as a threat to democracy; killing its leaders, such as Fred Hampton; and imprisoning many of its members under dubious pretenses. Committed to learning the lessons of the 1960s and 70s, Black Lives Matter has chosen less muscular taglines.

But as that movement has matured, it has tried to learn the lessons of the Black Power era, pointing a watchful, anxious, dwindling white majority to the goals, rather than the tactics that have led to such fierce protests in the streets. The goal is safety; one tactic is self-defense. The goal is demonstrating that Black lives have value; the tactic is protest.

There is an earnestness to Black Lives Matter. A kind of barefaced removing of the gloves and the pugilism. Perhaps this is an homage to Trayvon Martin, who in his last moments was meandering through his fathers girlfriends neighborhood, chatting on the phone with his friend Rachel, unconcerned, as all young people should have the freedom to be, with the monster lurking in the bushes.

To this earnestness, the aggressors, who still are almost always white, have responded with cynicism, obfuscation, and gun sales. George Zimmerman added to the chorus by successfully auctioning for $250,000 the gun he had used to kill Martin.

What, then, does public safety actually look like if youre Black? To have that conversation means we are ready to think about the inherent unsafety and aggression of whiteness, about how those who are invested in the worst iterations of white identity politics frequently create the social conditions against which Black life needs defending. It is Roof being received warmly in a Charleston church while murder plots and plans teemed in his heart. It is Kyle Rittenhouse auditioning for a gunfight and then crying when the world obliged him.

Wells understood that the law would not protect Black life. For her, guns in every Black home were the ticket to respect. I remain ambivalent, vacillating between following the legacy of my grandmother, who always kept both a rifle and a pistol at the ready, and leaning into my own intimate knowledge of the devastation guns bring, as the daughter of parents who were both victims of gun violence, my father fatally so. I dont know that I believe guns are the guarantor of respect for Black life, given how much Black life they have taken. Im fairly sure the only places more guns can lead us to are war, death, and destruction. At the same time, Im a committed member of the Dont start none, wont be none and Dont pull the thang out unless you plan to bang generation.

What continues to elude us, despite recent rejections of white vigilantism and excessive police force, is respect for Afro-American life. Over the past ten years, social-justice movements have used the streets, the courts, the voting booth, and the bully pulpit to mount a full-scale defense of Black life. But until we are able to tell the cold, hard truth about the existential threat of white racial aggression, not only to people of color but to the country as a whole, speaking of self-defense will be mere obfuscation. And the tools, the weapons, of self-defense will remain the province of those who picked the fights in the first place.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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Standing Your Ground While Black - The Cut

A march in 2020. Photo: Joshua Rashaad McFadden

Andrew Smith had his arms in the air when NYPD officer Michael Sher forcibly snatched down his face mask and fired pepper spray into his eyes. Smith and hundreds of others had gathered at the corner of Bedford and Tilden Avenues in Flatbush to peacefully protest police violence and racial injustice, as millions across the country were doing in the days after George Floyds murder. I made sure my hands [were] exaggeratedly almost in a YMCA stance, Smith told the Daily News, to make clear that Im not here to make an issue. His compliance didnt matter. White people protesting alongside Smith also had their hands up, but Sher singled out the 31-year-old Black Brooklyn resident. I ripped the shit off, and I used it, Sher boasted of the incident minutes later, an admission captured by the officers own body-camera footage.

Smith was one of the NYPDs numerous victims during the Black Lives Matter protests. Officers plowed a police SUV into a crowd of demonstrators in Prospect Heights part of the wave of at least 104 car rammings, according to terrorism researcher Ari Weil, a number of them committed by white supremacists and law enforcement that summer. Police punched peaceful protesters in the face, body-slammed them to the ground, struck them with clubs, broke their fingers, beat them from car tops, and pointed guns in their direction. Journalists, legal observers, and medical volunteers were not spared the flagrant brutality and abuse. Protesters chanted, We are peaceful! What the fuck are you? in response to the violence.

In many ways, the historic demonstrations of 2020 resembled the nonviolent civil-rights marches of the first half of the 1960s, yet authorities responded to the protests violently. The police today are just as brutal as they were in the 1960s but are jacked up after decades of militarization.

New York City in summer 2020 looked much as it had in July 1964, when Harlem and Bed-Stuy erupted for six nights after a 15-year-old high-school student named James Powell was fatally shot by an NYPD lieutenant. Police beat demonstrators with their fists and their clubs, shot their firearms in the air, and detonated tear-gas grenades. Residents, in turn, taunted police, threw Molotov cocktails at them, hurled bricks and bottles from rooftops, looted stores, and set buildings ablaze.

A protest in Harlem in July 1964. Photo: AP PHOTO/AP

National authorities responded to the rebellion in Harlem in 1964, and to the thousands that followed across the U.S. through the early 1970s, by declaring a War on Crime and supporting an unprecedented investment in local law enforcement. By the end of the decade, police departments from New York to Los Angeles had veritable arsenals at their disposal: firearms such as AR-15s and M4 carbines, steel helmets, three-foot batons, gas masks, tanks, helicopters, and a host of chemical weapons. Much of this equipment had been used by the U.S. military in Vietnam and Latin America, like, in our own time, the mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles driven first in Iraq and then in New York.

Although repressive measures against protesters have escalated in recent years amid ongoing police militarization, protesters themselves have grown more peaceful. According to the Washington Post, at the height of the civil-rights movement, between 1960 and 1968, roughly 11 percent of protests whether nonviolent direct action or full-scale rebellion involved property damage. By contrast, only 4 percent of the thousands of nationwide demonstrations in the summer of 2020 involved property damage. Police too suffered less harm than their counterparts in the earlier period: 2 percent of cops reported injuries during the 2020 protests as opposed to 6 percent through the civil-rights era.

Contrary to the fearmongering rhetoric of conservative politicians and media outlets, Black Lives Matter has advanced the direct-action tactics of the civil-rights movement. We were out for a peaceful march, 22-year-old Devin Khan told The City. Khan was injured by the NYPD SUV and was later struck with a police baton on his shoulder and abdomen while demonstrating on the Manhattan Bridge. I saw old people, mothers with children, people in wheelchairs, Asian, white, Black all kinds of people who are just tired and angry with whats happening. Smith, Khan, and tens of millions of other protesters across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., were exercising their First Amendment rights to challenge the decision to invest in police forces, surveillance technologies, and prison systems over schools, jobs, and decent shelter for poor people. Were not domestic terrorists, said Khan.

When the police arrived at otherwise nonviolent demonstrations ready to do battle, sporting helmets and protective armor that made them look like RoboCop, they set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy. The instances in New York and other cities when people threw water bottles and other objects at officers, set police cruisers on fire, and caused property damage often occurred after police had aggressively patrolled peaceful marches and vigils. The lesson here is that antagonistic policing tends to incite violence, especially when people are protesting the very thing they are then subjected to.

The cycle of police violence, protests against that violence, and an ever more aggressive police response will continue until the underlying socioeconomic drivers of inequality that extend far beyond a single law-enforcement agency are addressed. Yes, theres the danger of COVID, but even if that goes away, weve got these other viruses racism, white supremacy, police brutality, said 24-year-old Hazkel Brown, who suffered nerve damage to his right arm after an NYPD officer hit him with a baton during a peaceful demonstration, to The City. Those viruses arent going anywhere unless people are willing to do something.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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The Return of the Mass Protest - The Cut

The Wendys where Rayshard Brooks was killed, on June 13, 2020. Photo: Joshua Rashaad McFadden/The New York Times/REDUX

Two weeks after uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd left Atlanta littered with ashes, protesters flooded the citys streets once more. The police had killed again, and this time the victim was an Atlantan: 27-year-old father and music lover Rayshard Brooks, shot in the back twice by Atlanta police officer Garrett Rolfe. The Wendys where Rolfe killed Brooks the day before went up in flames, lighting up the night as protesters chanted and mourned, decrying a system that disproportionately takes the lives of Black people as a matter of course.

You are disgracing our city, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms had declared when the protests broke out two weeks earlier. Bottomss admonishment was celebrated by pundits and politicians, winning her a national profile. If you care about this city, then go home, she urged.

But protesters filled the streets precisely because they cared so deeply. Six years after the first round of Black Lives Matter uprisings, it felt to many that the system had not fundamentally shifted. The 2020 protests popularized the demand to defund the police and invest instead in community-based safety and well-being a demand that many organizers in Atlanta had been working to make reality for the previous two decades.

Despite those efforts, the citys leadership responded to the 2020 uprisings with a mix of co-option, half-measures, and brutal police repression a pattern the city has long practiced. Indeed, the reaction to Rayshard Brookss killing was in some ways predictable the result of decades of sweeping police violence under the rug and disregarding organizers demands.

In 2006, 92-year-old grandmother Kathryn Johnston was murdered by Atlanta Police Department officers in her home after officers entered under a no knock warrant, the same type of warrant police had when they killed Breonna Taylor 14 years later. In response, civil-rights leaders, including Joseph E. Lowery, a onetime confidant of Martin Luther King Jr., led the charge to revive civilian oversight of police, in the hopes of exposing the pervasive violence that the department had historically kept quiet. At the same time, community members gathered at a local church to demand consequences for the officers and broader reforms.

Following the outcry, the city established the Atlanta Citizen Review Board in 2007. Many hoped this would begin a process of accountability, but two years later, the ACRB still had little authority to address police misconduct. It could not, for instance, force officers to testify or otherwise cooperate with investigations. City leadership had purported to concede a demand but refused to cede any power.

By the time Johnstons killers were convicted, the high-profile murder of a local bartender had fueled a narrative of rising crime and calls to increase policing. In response, a group of public defenders, local organizers, service providers, and those living in police-saturated neighborhoods formed Building Locally to Organize for Community Safety. (Tiffany Roberts, who co-wrote this story, is a co-founder.) BLOCS advocates knew that the criminal convictions of officers would not change the devastation that tough-on-crime tactics continued to have on their communities, and they began working for more substantive accountability.

In 2010, BLOCS won more power for the ACRB, and the next year, the organization pushed the city to dismantle the APDs paramilitary Red Dog Unit, the source of frequent complaints of excessive force. The year before, the unit had raided the Atlanta Eagle, a gay bar in midtown Atlanta, and assaulted patrons. Red Dog had also been accused of performing unconstitutional public strip searches of predominantly Black men. Community members cheered at the news of Red Dogs dissolution, but the city quickly replaced the unit with APEX a brand-new militarized APD squad that would come to perform many of the same functions as its predecessor, conducting raids in what it called high crime areas.

In 2014, when Officer Darren Wilson murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson Atlanta protested with the rest of the nation. A year later, Atlantas official Black Lives Matter chapter was founded. By the time hundreds of protesters blocked an Atlanta interstate in 2016 leading then-Mayor Reed to ahistorically opine that Dr. King would never take a freeway the citys response to demonstrations and policy advocacy had become increasingly hostile, with officials eagerly deploying law enforcement to combat the growing movement.

Despite opposition, organizers notched crucial wins, including the creation of what is now called the Policing Alternatives & Diversion Initiative, which would reduce police contact with those criminalized for poverty; significant reforms to the citys cash-bail system; the (still unfulfilled) promise to close the city jail; and the dissolution of federal contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

At the same time, police murders in Atlanta continued apace, taking the lives of Alexia Christian in 2015, Deravis Caine Rogers in 2016, Deaundre Phillips in 2017, and organizer Oscar Cain Jr. in 2019. And efforts by regressive councilmembers, municipal judges, and APD allies to roll back key reforms began almost as soon as they were passed.

In 2020, the citys response to the uprisings was marked by brutal police repression, even as the governor of Georgia deployed the National Guard. Police were deployed to quash protests, often trapping protesters in Atlantas famous Centennial Olympic Park before shipping them off to the closest jail. Using tear gas, rubber bullets, and sheer force, police injured and arrested protesters throughout the summer. During just two weeks of demonstrations, police arrested roughly 600 people, cycling hundreds through already overcrowded jails in the middle of a deadly pandemic.

The Bottoms administrations response to Brookss death a mix of superficial proposals and police repression was more evidence that the old ways were not working. After convening an advisory council to issue emergency recommendations on use-of-force policies for the Atlanta police, the mayor cherry-picked just under half of the suggestions, generally electing to investigate or study rather than substantively address the issues that led to Brookss death. Even as the call to defund the police reached the mainstream, Bottomss administration insisted instead on the need for additional training and protocols. But as protesters in the streets made clear, these reforms as envisioned and practiced by the city had failed to stem the violence.

Rolfe, Brookss killer, was himself evidence of tepid reforms inability to resolve the crisis. Indeed, on paper, he is the ideal modern, reformed officer. He had reportedly undergone 2,000 hours of training, including sessions on de-escalation tactics, cultural-awareness training, and instruction on use of deadly force. None of this preparation stopped him from killing Rayshard Brooks.

Most recently, in 2021, Mayor Bottomss administration worked closely with the Atlanta Police Foundation one of policings fiercest defenders in Atlanta to create plans for a police training facility, named Cop City by organizers who rose up to fight it. If built, Cop City would require the partial destruction of critical green space in Atlanta and far outstrip the training facilities of the much larger L.A. and New York police departments. As one of Bottomss last major projects before leaving office, Cop City would expand the footprint of policing in Atlanta just one year after mass protests calling to defund the police.

Even still, hope remains. Organizers continue to build support for alternatives to policing, pick up electoral wins, practice mutual aid, and form creative coalitions to meet the moment, while ongoing protests send a clear message: As long as political leadership relies on policing to resist, sidestep, and quash demands for transformation, police will continue to kill, and cities will continue to burn.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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The Failure of Police Reform - New York Magazine

September 1, 2016, in San Diego, California: Eric Reid (No. 35) and Colin Kaepernick (No. 7) of the San Francisco 49ers kneel on the sideline during national anthem, as free agent Nate Boyer stands, before the game with the San Diego Chargers at Qualcomm Stadium. Photo: Michael Zagaris/San Francisco 49ers/Getty Images

Unless you know what to look for, its not clear why the photo is notable, let alone historic. It shows a football field, Levis Stadium in Santa Clara, California, before the start of a game. The teams are on their respective sidelines. Nothing is happening. The playing surface is still smooth, and if anything stands out, its the 50-yard-line logo: SF, for San Francisco. If you arent looking closely for the player wearing No. 7, the only one sitting down, youll probably miss him.

But hes there, a red speck near the bottom of the frame. Colin Kaepernicks protest would soon upend the world of professional sports, though nine months earlier, his body had betrayed him. He had lost his starting-quarterback gig to a younger player and suffered a season-ending labrum tear in his shoulder that required surgery. He was 29 years old and three years removed from his Super Bowl appearance, and success had eluded him since then. Criticisms he had faced since becoming a starter that he was physically impressive but cognitively limited, uneasy in the pocket and unable to read defenses had fueled the broad impression that he was little more than a body.

So by August 2016, when a reporter named Jennifer Lee Chan photographed Kaepernicks first documented refusal to stand during the national anthem, igniting a controversy that led to his vilification by the Trumpist right and his blackballing by the leagues owners, the ailing quarterback wasnt just out for justice. He was seeking control.

A paradox of professional athletics is how mastery over ones body facilitates its surrender. Few jobs call for such exhaustive submission to the dominion of other people. Players spend years fine-tuning muscles most people dont even know exist, breaking them down and rebuilding them to perform astonishing feats under duress, only to realize that autonomy is an illusion. Team executives use athletes as assets to trade and discard as it suits them, while spectators project and process their neuroses through the players.

Kaepernicks battle raged on two fronts. A maelstrom of circumstances gave the Black Lives Matter movement its unique contours, and one of the more striking aspects was the involvement of high-profile athletes, many of whom were negotiating professional reckonings at the same time. This was not a coincidence. When LeBron James led his Miami Heat teammates in their silent protest after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, he was less than two years removed from his infamous Decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and join rivals Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in South Beach to form the NBAs first modern superteam an alliance of stars who would have, in years past, sought championships as leaders of their own franchises.

The next half-decade saw James smeared as a traitor and accused of ruining the sport. Since then, the formulation he pioneered has become the league norm, heralding a departure from the days when players settled for the hand fate dealt them when they were drafted. A new age had come, marked by greater self-determination over how and where their bodies were deployed.

Variations on this theme echoed across sports. In womens athletics, it often materialized in disputes over equal pay. The killing of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer in 2014 came months into an intensifying debate about WNBA players flying overseas for money. Brittney Griner, it was reported, earned 12 times more to play in a Chinese league during the WNBAs off-season than she received during her entire rookie campaign with the Phoenix Mercury. The resulting discontent rippled outward; after the killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in 2016, WNBA players wore BLACK LIVES MATTERemblazoned shirts to their pregame warm-ups and declined to talk to reporters about anything besides police violence, resulting in fines from the league.

The U.S. womens soccer team was fresh off their victory at the 2015 World Cup when Megan Rapinoe knelt during the national anthem in solidarity with Kaepernick. They were embroiled in their own push for equal pay, premised on the absurdity of earning less money than their flailing male counterparts. Tennis star Naomi Osaka has made her support for the Black Lives Matter movement an exception to her reluctance to speak in public. Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history, became an outspoken supporter of the movement as she openly assailed her professions sanctioning body, USA Gymnastics, for enabling the sexual abuse of its athletes by Dr. Larry Nassar.

For his part, Kaepernicks dilemmas werent limited to his injuries or deteriorating relationship with the 49ers. Revelations about the long-term effects of concussions among NFL players had recently turned litigious, forcing the league to admit, after years of lying and thousands of lawsuits from ex-players, that football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy were linked.

All of these conflicts dealt with a basic question how athletes might take greater control of the way their bodies are used that was coming into focus for the players long before the misuse and abuse of human bodies became a national fixation. And for many, these concerns would only get more entwined. When NBA players initiated a wildcat strike during the COVID-disrupted homestretch of the 2020 season, it was nominally about getting more league support for that summers protests. But the strike followed a series of physical attacks against their fellow players by the police. Thabo Sefolosha, then a forward for the Atlanta Hawks, had his fibula broken by cops outside a New York City nightclub in 2015. Milwaukee police officers assaulted thenBucks guard Sterling Brown in a Walgreens parking lot in 2018.

Historically, the challenge of such paradigm-shifting moments has been less about drawing attention to these outrageous injustices to energize the public than funneling that energy into lasting solutions. Just as the advantages of athlete involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement were self-evident its help in mainstreaming once-marginal ideas about racism and policing, for example so were its drawbacks. A celebrity milieu begets celebrity-driven problem-solving. The NBAs strike broke not after radical changes to how this country addresses public safety but after some players phoned Barack Obama, who advised them to establish a social-justice committee and keep playing. The banner result was the leagues making some of its arenas available as voter precincts in the 2020 election almost a cruel joke, in retrospect, given how ineffectual the subsequent Congress has been in passing police reforms.

Elsewhere, the athletes particular mix of concerns, social and professional, skewed queasily and predictably toward the latter. The glaring refusal of many NBA players to admit that the Chinese governments abuses of the countrys Uighur minority were, in fact, bad China is a huge revenue generator for the league often overwhelmed their cries for human rights in the U.S.

One thread stands out, though: the galvanizing potential of feeling precarious. The psychic bridge that links the worries of a teenager walking home in suburban St. Louis to those of a multimillionaire athlete in Santa Clara is clear once you recognize that both look in the mirror and see a body in peril. This is not to equate the two but to note their rare convergence over the past decade and to ask what its rareness says about the long-term durability of their shared response. Can precarity felt by rich and famous athletes sustain ten more years of their investment in this movement? The only certainty, for now, is that the police will give them plenty of opportunities to show us.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New York Magazine.

Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

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Black Athletes and the Value of a Body - New York Magazine

President Obama in 2009. Photo: Pete Souza/The White House

I was 17 when President-elect Obama walked across the stage in Grant Park with his Black, beautiful, accomplished wife and their two young Black daughters to give his acceptance speech. Its a hazy memory. The morning after, still groggy, I wondered if I drifted during coverage and dreamt it. Coming out of her bedroom, slow and curious like a shadow, my mother stood beside me, mouth agape at the television screen. I cant believe it, she whispered, as if not to awaken some alternate reality. It was what one might imagine a fantastical, spectacular culmination of thousands of years of struggle to feel like. It was satisfying, the spite of it all: this Black man, on this stage, with his Black family, knowing there were witnesses who doubted his legitimacy or, worse, would rather see him dead than occupy the White House. Id never felt that high of representation mirroring me.

President Obama was president for eight years. Im 30 now and staring down the greatest threat to African American voting rights in generations. A climate crisis threatens the livelihoods of the Black and poor, of the Black and coastal, of the Black and immigrant. We face a wealth gap that has only worsened in the last decade, leaving Black communities even more vulnerable to the failures of late-stage capitalism than they already were before the First Black Presidency. As the killings of Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray, the loop of uprisings that followed, and the anti-capitalist, socialist movement of Occupy Wall Street shaped our perspectives, young people of the Black Lives Matter generation learned quickly, and with much devastation, that representation had a hole in it where our ideas of justice rooted in policy dematerialized. We had set the bar too high. We expected our first Black president to decry the actions of the racist police, to call off the dogs and stand unequivocally with protesters to somehow inherit Martin Luther King Jr.s project of disarming white supremacy and see it through to a different end. He didnt. He hedged and stood tall in two-sides-ism, calling angry civilians thugs and their uprising a counterproductive distraction to the more peaceful protesters doing things the right way. What we expected of the Obama administration was beyond what the framework of the presidency allowed. That was a heartbreaking realization. Some of us came to it sooner than others.

Police departments and some communities have to do some soul-searching, Obama said in an address to the nation the afternoon after Baltimore burned following Grays funeral. But I think we as a country have to do some soul-searching.

Try as we might, no generation can escape the solipsism of disappointment. I blush some at the reality that there are plenty who came before us, those elders and mentors and teachers who organized in labor movements of the 70s and 80s, radical Black feminists of the Combahee River Collective who studied socialist theory, and antiwar movements of the 60s. They were plenty skeptical. And said as much. In the practice of our politics, the Combahee River Collective Statement drafted in 1977 says, we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving correct political goals. It feels like a warning. Learning from the scholarship of the organizers who came before us mightve cost us less suffering.

In essence, President Obama did exactly what he was supposed to do, what every white man in this position before him had done prove to America that he was president for all, subject of and beholden to loyalty to country. For some Black Americans, the talented-tenth generation, older and more keen on respectability, this was evidence of progress, proof positive that hed fulfilled the ultimate goal of assimilation permission to be free from the obligations and limitations of race. For my fellowship, the generation of Occupy Wall Street and Trayvon Martin, such wish-fulfillment was a loss. When Obama was on the campaign trail for president, there was still a part of him that was ours: He was supposed to be the Organizer from Chicago. Wed heard that he had cut his teeth on the stones of our history. But the day he crossed that stage as president-elect, he became the figurehead of the elite, of the ruling class, a symbol of its evolution toward a new racial permeability the kind that exists to create a new, racially integrated class of leaders only meant to continue the project of neoliberalism and its genesis, white supremacy.

What my generation started to learn about power the day of Obamas Baltimore remarks was that the power of the people might never translate to the presidency. That emulating the power structures that govern us could only get us so far. Most critically, we started to learn that, regardless of how successful representation might appear, representation alone isnt The Work. One too many Cousin Pookie references on top of President Obamas suggestion that Black poor mothers feed their children cold Popeyes for breakfast, and weve seen representations ugliness made plain.

Already, were seeing reticence and a growing collective side-eye reflected in recent elections, where Black candidates and electeds struggled to ignite the Democrats most reliable base through the fog and fatigue of a post-Obama, post-Trump world. In New York City, where new mayor Eric Adams has already begun to reinstate archaic, racist policing strategies like the controversial Anti-Gun Police Unit to go with his general cop rhetoric, or in San Francisco, where nearly a decade ago, the states top cop would refuse to investigate and prosecute a series of killings by police, yet go on to become the current vice-president of the United States, theres an asterisk next to the value of political representation, a gnawing feeling that it may have been a bad gamble. Perhaps weve opened the proverbial door so wide that it smacks us in the ass. Weve sat on Americas throne, history has been made in name but in Georgia, Stacey Abrams gears up to run a race she should never have lost in the first place as franchisement for Black voters is rolled back little by little each decade. Weve earned our skepticism.

Representation has, in many ways, gotten us closer to the truth about how our politics actually work. And its taught us everything we need to know about power: that its a limited resource. That figureheads of democracy are just figureheads unless the tools of democracy belong equally to the people furthest from the power structure. It taught us that while the ruling class has racial permeability, our ability to move through the corridors of power doesnt inherently constitute an ability to change the structural functions of power to empower. And it taught us that no matter who owns the keys to the White House, the power and persuasion of the executive branch will likely bend toward it. So, like any scarred romantic, young Black voters are more guarded of our vote, less tolerant of the two-page pamphlet on jobs and crime that many candidates have gotten away with calling race-conscious policy. Its forced everyone to get more specific about what it really looks like to leverage the power of the federal government to protect and advance the rights and liberties of Black people.

When we hit the streets after the killings of Trayvon and Freddie Gray, we were demanding that Black children be free from racist policing a general, while powerful, demand. Ten years later, after countless broken promises, reckoning only with police violence is a cop-out; were continuing the legacy of Occupy Wall Street, of Black feminist organizers, and are instead building coalitions focused on ending the police state. The priority shift should hardly feel surprising. Some of the same organizers and voters who marched at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, and sat in the cold during Occupy as teenagers, are now adults. Theyre also community organizers and national leaders done with rising through ancient ranks of control to build power. For them, reform isnt enough. Neither are the old tactics of slow and steady restructuring or the persuasion of relatability and charm.

When we say we want leaders who represent us, we mean leaders who represent us on the issues, who represent those bound to these systems of power. Any candidate who wants the vote of the people who have time and time again been let down by a nation that has promised so much and delivered so little will have to speak the language of progress meaningfully to win meaningful results.

But I cant, in good faith, say that representation politics have given us nothing. I loved the dream of the First Black President, and cherished the idea of President Obama. I can admit that I was still moved by the poetics of what representation could mean, by the endless metaphors it offered up about Blackness survivability and resistance. But what I discovered is that representation is, fundamentally, a metaphor. And a metaphor is made up of two parts, what Jericho Brown calls, the tenor and the vehicle. The vehicle of the metaphor, in its most literal sense, brings you closer to the thing you want to know more about, moves you closer to meaning. We say, There is power in representation, because power is the thing we want to know more about. And when we talk about representation in our politics, what were trying to understand is how power works and then how to emulate it. This is representations true utility: it tells us what we need to know about power so that we can get around it. Its not the nail; its the hammer.

Perhaps President Obama, his quixotic nature soon replaced by the gray hairs and hard truths of his first term, felt himself trapped by representation. Trapped by the surveillance and vitriol associated with representation, by the weight and responsibility of being the first. Maybe he wanted to act up! Perhaps he dreamed of being the kind of president who could achieve universal health care, cut incarceration rates, and erase the myth of Black inferiority. And perhaps some of the grays can be attributed to late nights wondering whether Black people might understand just how much self-sacrifice went into doing that job with his head down all so that some snotty-nosed, morally superior kid who grew up seeing his face on the news could come along and feel self-affirmed enough to critique him. It would be an awkwardly fair irony.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New York Magazine.

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The Fallacy of Representation - The Cut