Description
Book SynopsisThe Social Protests of 2020: Visceral Responses to Police Brutality, COVID-19, and Circumscribed Sexuality collects voices from various Black intellectuals – university professors, a scientist, media communication specialist, poets, a visual artist, and political activists – to illustrate how the simultaneity of high-profile political events in the summer of 2020 manifest in our consciousness at one time. Reflecting the contributors’ honest visceral responses, the essays reveal the anguish, sadness, and motivation to act that each of them experienced in light of police brutality, COVID-19, and the Supreme Court's handling of employment discrimination against LGBTQIA+ communities. These voices address, in carefully reflected and theoretically formed ways, those universal feelings that level all human beings, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, economic status, and education.
Table of ContentsChapter I: The Space Between Grief and Gratitude: A Letter to My Beloved Friends”
Ana-Maurine Lara
Chapter II: “Moving to the Left: Black Response to Structural Violence”
Wende Marshall
Chapter III: “People Who Have Done Bad Things: Why the Idea of Police Has Failed”
Melba Joyce Boyd
Chapter IV: “Sanctioned Murders: An Epidemic Disease”
Joyce A. Joyce
Chapter V: “No Love: ‘Tennis’ in the Era of Pills, Exceptionalism, and Black Lives Matter”
Gregory E. Rutledge,
Chapter VI: “Better Late than Never”
Donna Marie Peters
Chapter VII: “The Brotherhood Gone Viral: Reading Invisible Man on #blackouttuesday”
Margarita M. Castromán Soto
Chapter VIII: “To Protect and Serve: Medieval Knights, the Police, and Sexual Violence”
Carissa M. Harris
Chapter IX: Fieldwork, Flowers, and the Force: A Perspective on Gender Expression, Profession, Race, and Policing”
Élan R. Alford
Chapter X: “The Toll of Devaluing Black People’s Humanity Is to Live in a Nation that Will Feel Like Home to No One”
Yvonne Fulmore
Chapter XI: “Apocalypse Rot”
Ewuare Osayande
Chapter XII: “For B.R.E.A.T.H.E” and “. . . To you”
Everett Hoagland
Chapter XIII: “The New Rent Party Or, in the Words of Sonia Sanchez, ‘How Does One Scream in Thunder?’ Asking for a Friend.”
Quincy Scott Jones
Chapter XIV: “opus 132 free”
Yolanda Wisher
Chapter XV: “Worldstar’s Poetica”
Edythe Rodriguez
