TCNJ

19 FALL 2020 Within hours, people in Minneapolis, where Floyd spent his final moments, took to the streets to let out a distinctive rage. Within days, thousands across the country would organize and join demonstrations to declare that enough was enough, that all Black lives matter, and that clashing with the police was neces- sary in this renewed fight for justice. A movement that explicitly dubbed itself "anti-racist" quickly grew. People of all ages and backgrounds pledged to defend and open up their wallets on behalf of Black lives; books about how to dismantle racism and white supremacy flew off the shelves; Merriam-Webster acknowledged the effect of systemic racism; white leaders at all kinds of establishments, from fashion platforms to renowned magazines, lost their jobs for doing too little to bolster equity and inclusion; big-name athletes and teams went on strike with the demand that the police stop killing people. At academic insti- tutions, including The College of New Jersey, professors and students alike brazenly called out curricula for not going far enough. Then came some of the changes protesters most fervently demanded: Some city councils across the country rethought police budgets, school districts ended contracts with law enforcement, and some states made police misconduct records public. Though far from the progressive call to abolish the carceral state in its entirety, some change has come. Perhaps the most notable is the shift in public opinion, and in a pivotal election year — more Americans now believe that racism and police bru- tality are problems. Moving forward, institutions like TCNJ must deter- mine how to bring about systemic reform but also recognize that change is incremental; the moment did not start this year and won't end soon. For historian Christopher Fisher, who entered his 21st year as a member of TCNJ's faculty this fall, the 2020 uprising has been especially pro- found since multiple pandemics have collided and merged to create a con- coction that has jolted people to take action in ways they never had before. "There was a violence to the way that COVID-19 shut our lives down, and that's one of the subtexts of every- thing that happened with the pro- tests and the killing of George Floyd," Fisher says. "His killing echoed through the moment and snapped all of the other elements of violence — political violence, rhetorical violence, economic violence — all the things that were happening at that moment seemed to snap into focus and crystal- lize in his pain." What's more is that the spread of COVID-19, and the way in which the pandemic has disproportionately affected communities of color, further highlighted how racism and police brutality are part of everyday life for Black Americans. "Even though the world was shut down, those officers still had enough time to commit that merciless act. Everything had shut down except racist violence," Fisher says. "Despite everything, they were willing to go that extra mile to make sure that Floyd did not transgress the system." In Floyd's death — "suffocation by strangulation" — Fisher sees a painful metaphor for the intense way that our "hyper-politicized and hyper-racial- ized society is suffocating the United States." Suffocation is at the heart of the coronavirus, literally taking away people's ability to breathe, coupled with the systemic oppression and partisanship that wield suffocation to varying degrees. That people immediately began to march in protest was no surprise; the deaths of Trayvon Martin in Florida, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Sandra Bland in Texas had previ- ously shown us that people are angry and want change. What's different this time is that so many white people stopped, paid attention, and jumped to action, though many efforts remain imperfect. "I was shocked that so many people who were outraged by this were white," Fisher says. "When we look back on this moment, we are going to see that people couldn't escape it. Most of the time, Americans are distracted by life." In the past when a Black person would die at the hands of police, white people maybe paused to say "that's terrible" but went about their lives, picking up their children from school, visiting their relatives, going on vacation and to brunch, Fisher explained. "The system depends on us being dis- tracted," Fisher says, citing Founding Fathers like James Madison who in the Federalist Papers devised a model of government that would give citizens unlimited access to their interests and ambitions so as to ensure that factions never had time to threaten the state. But now that more people are waking up, starting on a journey of anti-racism and deciding to be

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