WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 22nd December, 2020) The year 2020 was marked by social upheaval and attempts to reinvent America, including through the pain and passion of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement - a nationwide wave of protests in the name of racial equity and opposition to police violence.
What started as an outburst of anger against a random case of police brutality grew to claim a prominent place in a centuries-long struggle for emancipation of communities of color, drawing a direct ancestry line to epic victories over slavery and segregation.
Intrinsically woven into an unprecedented tangle of 2020 crises, the BLM movement tapped its rage from coronavirus pandemic disparities, fed on quarantine constraints, was exploited by warring political camps for electoral gains and used them in return.
The wheels of history were set in motion on May 25 when Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis policeman, used a chokehold detention technique on George Floyd, an African American man suspected of passing a $20 counterfeit bill. The officer kneeled on his neck, pinning it to the ground for nearly eight minutes, as Floyd begged for mercy until he became unresponsive.
"I can't breathe," the man's final words, made a rallying cry for many thousands of Americans who took to the streets from coast to coast, shocked and infuriated by the torment that was captured on video in every disturbing detail.
"Say his name!" chanted crowds in New York and Philadelphia. "George Floyd!" responded Seattle and Los Angeles.
"Defund the police!" demanded protesters whose appearance at the very gates of the White House reportedly prompted the Secret Service to hastily evacuate President Donald Trump to a safe bunker.
More than 7,750 BLM demonstrations were held in 2,440 locations across all 50 US states and the nation's capital during the 90 days following Floyd's death, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED).
BLM became one of the largest protest movements in US history partly due to socioeconomic factors, which were exacerbated by a pandemic that hit African Americans disproportionately hard due to their working in front-line jobs, earning less and lacking access to adequate healthcare, researchers have said.
Protesters were mobilized by Floyd's death, but demanded justice for other African American victims in 2020, such as Breonna Taylor, 26, who was shot during a police raid in Louisville, Kentucky after her boyfriend fired upon officers. They also demanded justice for Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year old Black man murdered by three white residents while jogging in Georgia.
Even as the campaign went on, more Names were appearing on the remembrance list - from Rayshard Brooks killed in Atlanta to Jacob Blake shot seven times and severely wounded by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Devoid of a unified command and coherent agenda, protests across the country pressed mostly for the lowest common denominator - a prosecution of culprits and sweeping police reforms - something some Federal and state authorities swiftly committed to. However, they stopped short of slashing law-enforcement budgets as many activists demanded.
"Instead of using strange men with guns to inflict violence on people you reduce harm and prevent it ahead of time by serving people, keeping their basic needs met, creating community-oriented solutions that doesn't involve men with guns arresting people," an activist in rebellious Portland told Sputnik when asked to explain the concept behind calls for defunding police.
However, "defunding police" may have sounded like a grand rallying cry for protesters, there was a huge gap between reform theory and practice. The Minneapolis city council, for example, reversed its decision to dismantle the police after a 25% spike in violent crime. Instead, the city ended up cutting the police budget by less than 5 percent.
Many BLM activists have a more ambitious goal in mind though. They seek to eradicate the remnants of racist mentality and behavior still permeating American society.
"Getting in an elevator with a white person, you can see the fear by the look on their face. You can see it when you walk to a shopping mall and they get over to the other side of the street. You can see they clasp their purse, lock their doors when they pull out next to you waiting for a bus on the street corner," a black resident of Houston, Texas, told Sputnik on the fringes of Floyd's funeral.
"Microaggressions" they speak about sound like a routine evil, not brazen enough to make headlines, but it poisons - drop by drop - everyday lives of many African Americans, who are less and less eager to condone it.
Demonstrations often devolved into violent clashes between protesters and police, with members of the media at times finding themselves targeted by both sides.
A Russian reporter was hit by a non-lethal projectile on a night of riots in front of the White House - a foam-tipped sponge bullet - as big as a champagne cork. It did not penetrate the skin but left a visible bruise. It marked the journalist's first frontline injury in a career that included covering the Second Lebanon war, a military coup in Egypt, and multiple rounds of hostilities in the Gaza Strip.
His compatriots and colleagues were attacked, beaten and had their equipment destroyed by law enforcement officers during clashes in Portland. Another crew from a major Russian broadcaster survived an attack of a marauding gang in Philadelphia that was pillaging a footwear store on the margins of citywide demonstrations against another instance of law enforcement brutality.
Protests were frequently hijacked by radicals, marred by violence and looting, police overreaction or inaction. It took the authorities three days to quench the unrest in Washington, DC by enforcing a curfew and deploying thousands of National Guard soldiers, Secret Service and Drug Enforcement agents, Border Protection officers, and policemen of all stripes. They patrolled streets, closed major intersections, isolated neighborhoods, dispersed crowds and pushed their remains away from the White House.
The capital police came under fire by some critics for allegedly being on the defensive at best, allowing violent rioters to reach the gates of the presidential compound, torch buildings, burn cars, smash windows and vandalize historic landmarks in the heart of city.
Supporters of the protests often downplayed the millions of Dollars' worth of damage rendered by rioters and looters who destroyed property, stole merchandise and forced businesses to close. Or they justified the wreckage as a necessary byproduct of fighting police injustice.
"We are tired of this shit. Police brutality over and over again," two African-Americans in similar balaclavas and assault vests told Sputnik after protesters crushed with wooden sticks a Mercedes sedan. "If I die by the police, burn America down. They say George Floyd didn't want it. How do they know? Did he write it down somewhere?"
In Seattle, BLM protesters established around an abandoned police precinct an "autonomous zone," independent of government control. The city authorities were initially supportive of the experiment, but three weeks later forcefully reclaimed the area when it spawned an upsurge of criminal violence, including four shootings that left two teenagers dead.
Federal law enforcement agents were deployed to Portland, the whitest city in the United States, to protect court buildings from a handful of anarchists. However, they alienated the entire city by tear-gassing, beating, arresting and shooting indiscriminately scores of people - peaceful and violent protesters, journalists, volunteer medics, and human right activists. Thousands would turn out for nightly demonstrations that embraced BLM rhetoric and aesthetics until the contingent was withdrawn.
Tensions were further exacerbated across the country when counter-protesters stepped in to defend communities and back the police, whom they believe needed help because their hands were tied by the politicians. According to ACLED, over 360 counter-protests were recorded around the country, of which 43 - nearly 12 percent - turned violent.
A Sputnik reporter observed hundreds of antiracism protesters and self-defined "American patriots" from predominantly white militias confronting each other in central Louisville. Both sides wielded an impressive array of fire arms with magazines attached, but didn't go beyond verbal barbs and occasional fist fights in the stunning absence of the police.
"The police get their orders from the government and have been told several times to stand down. They can't show force," a militiaman, who introduced himself as Squelch, said. "Guess what? We are not police - we are allowed to speak out, to say 'Enough is enough.'"
Altercations did not always stay bloodless, however. In Kenosha a 17-year-old militiaman shot and killed two protesters who apparently attacked him. In Portland a member of the right-wing Patriot prayer group was shot dead by a suspect allegedly associated with the Antifa movement.
More recently, dozens of members from the Proud Boys, a far-right wing movement, easily recognizable in their yellow and black outfits, spearheaded two major rallies in Washington, DC in support of Trump's bid to overturn the election defeat. Both times they engaged in massive hand-to-hand brawls with equally belligerent BLM and Antifa activists.
A popular perception of BLM as an essentially violent phenomenon is not supported by scientific data though. ACLED study claims that more than 93 percent of all summer protests were peaceful with "violent demonstrations" reported from fewer than 220 locations.
Researchers attribute the aberration to "the media focus on looting and vandalism."
The BLM movement predictably became a major issue in the 2020 Presidential race with Joe Biden and his Democratic camp seen as sympathetic to protesters' demands while their Republican rivals, including Trump, focused more on the "law and order" agenda - an upsurge of violence and the need to counter it.
On the campaign trail, Biden would comfort victims of police brutality and running mate Kamala Harris, a Black, Asian American woman, addressed one the largest BLM demonstration timed to Martin Luther King's March on Washington.
During protest events political activists would routinely urge everyone to vote "like we never voted before," use mail-in ballots and assist neighbors in coming to polling stations.
Pro-Biden mainstream media were frequently criticized for overlooking and downplaying violent riots, while outlets sympathetic to the incumbent, fewer in number and weaker in voice, were accused of sowing fears among well-off suburban dwellers and ignoring fundamental causes of the BLM movement.
Trump himself chose sides when 25 minutes before a curfew he sent the police to disperse a demonstration near the White House. Law enforcement used flash bangs, pepper spray and sheer physical force on the crowd, all in order to secure passage for a presidential photo-op at the historic St John's Episcopal church that had caught fire during earlier riots.
ACLED estimated that Trump during the year 2020 ordered over 55 federal and National Guard deployments across the country. He ruthlessly criticized governors, mostly from the Democratic Party, who refused to cooperate with his law and order effort and sought to outlaw Antifa as a terrorist organization.
Trump also seized on the issue of cultural wars when protesters mounted attacks on monuments seen as celebrating America's colonial and racism legacy and even attempted to knock down President Andrew Jackson's equestrian figure in front of the White House. He issued an executive order authorizing federal agents to pursue demonstrators who pulled down statues, putting a lid on the phenomenon that threatened to spare neither Christopher Columbus nor Abraham Lincoln.
Russian historical monuments were also targeted. In July, Alaska's Sitka adopted a resolution to relocate the statue of explorer and city founder Alexander Baranov after a group of local activists called for its removal, citing mistreatment of indigenous peoples during the colonial era. Baranov founded Sitka in 1799, then called Novo-Archangelsk, as the capital of the Russian colonies in North America. In October, the Baranov statue was moved from its downtown location to the Sitka Historical Society Museum.
Symbolically, Washingtonians celebrated en masse Biden's victory over Trump at a newly founded BLM Square - the 16th and H streets intersection, a few thousand feet away from the White House. The same motto - Black Lives Matter - is painted in giant yellow letters on the pavement.
From the outset the president-elect had stayed true to his promise to address equality issues and is compiling the most diverse administration ever. He has thus far nominated at least seven women and nine people of color for Cabinet-level positions, including Lloyd Austin, the first African American to be Secretary of Defense, Janet Yellen, the first female Secretary of the Treasury, Alejandro Mayorkas, the first immigrant to lead the Department of Homeland Security.
"I don't see this election as being about choosing a candidate who will be able to lead us in the right direction. That will be about choosing a candidate who can be most effectively pressured into allowing more space for the evolving antiracism movement," Angela Davis, a veteran and an icon of America's antiracism campaign, said in an interview to RT. "Biden is very problematic in many ways. But - I say 'but' - Biden is far more likely to take mass demands seriously, far more likely than the current occupant of the White House."
