A global audience witnessed the lynching of George Floyd, on May 25, at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. Floyd’s agonizing death by suffocation, his pleas for help, and his final words, “I can’t breathe”—recorded in a cell phone video and promptly shared on Facebook by a quick-witted young bystander—have been viewed billions of times and have unleashed a shock wave of outrage and revulsion that continues to reverberate around the world.
Murders of black people in the United States by law enforcement officers are not uncommon, and thanks to near-universal access to video-enabled smartphones and social media, they are increasingly well documented. In recent years, videos recording these killings and other forms of police violence against African Americans have emerged with horrifying regularity; their release and the outpouring of fury, grief, and calls for change that they inspire have become a macabre national ritual. Global condemnation of racist violence by U.S. law enforcement is not new, either. But the extraordinary scale and reach of the reaction to Floyd’s death—which has ignited weeks of mass protests in at least 60 countries and prompted the UN human rights chief to convene a special session this week focused on systemic racism in the United States—represents an order-of-magnitude shift.
