The Summer of 2020 Is Going to Be Long, Violent, and Necessary

While the brutal deaths of Black people are often the drumbeat of American life, this specific tone is deafening.

Protesters move a wooden cask together into a fire in an attempt to burn down the Minneapolis 3rd police precinct after riots broke out all over the Twin Cities over the police killing of George Floyd. Chris Juhn/Zuma

The coronavirus is a rapidly developing news story, so some of the content in this article might be out of date. Check out our most recent coverage of the coronavirus crisis, and subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.

For nearly a week, protesters have taken to the streets in dozens of American cities. It’s a swelling of outrage and, thanks largely to militarized police forces, violence not seen in the United States since 1968, when a confluence of very preventable events—the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., escalation of the war in Vietnam, a bitter presidential election—pushed nearly anyone with a political conscience into physical action.

The specific circumstances of today’s unrest are different, and arguably more heartbreaking. In the first several months of 2020, at least a handful of Black people have been wantonly killed by police or white vigilantes. Ahmaud Arbery was jogging around his Brunswick, Georgia, neighborhood when white men chased him down in a pickup truck and shot him multiple times. Breonna Taylor was sleeping in her Louisville, Kentucky, apartment when cops executing a no-knock search warrant barged into her home. George Floyd was confronted by police in Minneapolis and effectively choked to death as an officer knelt down on his neck before a crowd of onlookers. Tony McDade was shot to death by an officer in Tallahassee, Florida.

While the violent deaths of Black people are often the drumbeat of American life, this specific tone is deafening. Converging at the same time, of course, is the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 100,000 people in America. Black communities have borne a disproportionate number of those deaths. A months-long lockdown has effectively shuttered the American economy and 40 million people have filed for unemployment. Stay-at-home orders issued by mayors and governors across the country to slow the spread of the virus have also had the unintended but inevitable effect of plunging even privileged people with safe homes and steady jobs to the brink of mental crisis. That’s to say nothing of the desperation felt by people without those safe homes or steady jobs.

I could keep listing the awful things, but I won’t. On some level, every one of us is stuck in our own private world of controlled chaos. To be human now is to be isolated, uncertain, and scared. It’s no wonder that so many people have taken to the streets. Outrage is a unifying emotion. It’s intimate and collective.

Listen to this essay, and more protest reporting from across the country, on this week’s episode of the Mother Jones Podcast:

Not even the bleakest of pessimists could have anticipated that the first term of Donald Trump’s presidency would end just like this. But don’t pretend any of this is a surprise. For three and a half years the president of the United States has used outright racism as a rallying call, baiting his followers to act. And they have. The seemingly small actions at barbecues and of bird watching had to inevitably lead to something larger. I was in a near catatonic state this weekend when I thought about reading James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to write this piece, but I was too dejected to do it. Instead, one line from Mos Def’s 1999 Black on Both Sides kept playing in my head: “Why did one straw break the camel’s back? Here’s the secret: the million other straws underneath it.”          

America’s long, violent summer has begun. Buildings will burn and people will die because people have been dying—in their homes, at local hospitals, and in detention centers. It would be naive and downright dangerous to expect anything different. 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate