Eddie Glaude on George Floyd: We Have To Be ‘Honest with Ourselves’ and ‘Understand How Profoundly Racist Our Country Is’

EXCERPT:

GLAUDE JR.: "We have to finally be honest with ourselves. We talked about this when this happened with El Paso. We have to understand how profoundly racist our country is and how it shapes the very ways in which communities are policed. That doesn’t lead to an indictment of each individual, but it gets us to the systemic nature of inequality. Think about this, Nicolle. You have a community that's experiencing trauma and terror simultaneously. Minnesota just hit its peak with COVID-19 yesterday in terms of the number of hospitalizations and the number of dead. African-Americans in Minnesota are disproportionately impacted by Coronavirus. So we’re dealing with the devastation of this pandemic, and we’re seeing Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. COVID has changed, in some ways arrested so much of what the country has been doing about the business as usual, except killing black folk, except the devaluation of black folk.“