KEY WORDS:

 Structural
 Systematic
 Underlying (subyacente)
 Background (trasfondo)
 Political speech
 Police brutality
 Racial injustice
 Institutional systemic problem
 Freedom of speech
 Heavy-handed approach to the protestors
 White supremacy
 Police defunding
 Misused of power

VOCABULARY:

 Thug: aggressive criminal

 Rally/ Riot: protest
 Recklessness: dangerous behaviour
 Mob: crowd of people
 Lawlessness: ilegalidad, anarquía
 Curfew: toque de queda

The facts: In Minneapolis four police officers responded to a call about a man that had used a
counterfeit twenty dollar bill to buy a packet of cigarettes. As a result, George Floyd was arrested,
handcuffed and pinned to the ground (prevent sb from moving) by one of the four officers.
Everything that was happening was filmed by the onlookers. The police officer who was pushing
him to the ground with the knee ignored the warnings of the people surrounding. He was
suffocating George Floyd. The police officer has applied pressure to his neck during 8 minutes and
46 seconds and later that evening George Floyd was pronounced dead.

The killing of George Floyd unlashed a series of events where people went out to the streets to
pronounce against racial injustice.

“No justice, no peace”

The family wants for the officers that killed George Floyd to be charged with murderer.
The four officers have been fired and the FBI is investigating the killing. Derek Chauvin, the officer
who killed George Floyd, was charged with third-degree murderer and manslaughter with a
maximum sentence of 35 years.

Even though the USA claim to be a nation based on equality, Afro-American people have always
been suffering the consequences of racism and violence.

“America and Britain were built on the back of slaves and colonised people.”

During the civil rights movement of the 1960s Martin Luther King confronted America with racism.
It was a decade when young people were marching for an equality life, integration, quality
education, health care, housing. Before that time, black people didn’t have the right to use public
toilettes or rent a room in the same hotels that white people attended. The law had to change and
also the behaviour. Martin Luther King was shot dead in Memphis in 1968.

With the election of Barack Obama as president in 2009 there was widespread hope that the USA
could finally start to their institutional violent and systematic racism problem.

The BLM movement was founded after the assassination of 17 years old Trayvon Martin in 2012 by
the hands of a white member of the neighbourhood watch. It started as a post on Facebook and
grew into a hash tag and then into an international movement. Its founders were three black
women.

“BLM DEMANDS AN AFFIRMATION OF BLACK FOLKLS HUMANITY”. There is a system existing that
is constantly working on dehumanizing and oppressing black people. Black lives are just as
important as anybody else’s.

There is something particular to notice that is that the assassination of George Floyd happened in
a very specific context where the entire world was and is still going through an enormous crisis
due to the coronavirus and its economic and social consequences.

“We realize that the only way to combat these two pandemics (coronavirus and black people
disproportionate murderer) is not by staying inside our homes but actually coming outside our
homes and helping one another.”

Democracy -

Criminality and looting that result after the protest has to be seen in a widen context and not by
itself. Although the bad inside these actions, if we start discussing whether these incidents affect
the movement or not we are getting too far away from the focus of the problem: demanding
justice for George Floyd’s murderer and the racist system behind that.

For a country that enshrines (consagrar) freedom of speech in its Constitution these riots and the
violent police response must not be accepted.
Donald Trump has made the protests a battleground between the two main political parties. The
interesting about these new generations of political protesters is that for them traditional parties
are part of the problem. The solution does not reside in the election of black democratic politics
but in dismantling the system that oppresses Afro-American people. “The BLM movement do not
want people to climb up the ladder; we want this ladder to be knocked down.”

The peaceful solution that George Floyd’s family was predicting about was that people must vote
in order to make a change because violence is not going to bring George Floyd back.

Mainstream media had become an important tool for communicating the BLM message and had a
deep impact in the protests around the world that happened as a consequence of GF murderer.

“There is not such thing as being “neutral” in the fight for justice. You are either on the side of the
oppressed or on the side of the oppressor”.

“Don’t say that in order for our communities to be more safe we need more cops; in order for our
community to be more safe we need access to better resources”.

The difference and what made this case an iconic one is that we had the chance to see the act of
murder in real time without filters or footage cuts. We saw the reality as it shows to ourselves.