Índex per June 22, 2020 a TIME Magazine

DURING ONE OF OUR RECENT TIME 100 TALKS, the singer, actor and activist Andra Day made a point that resonated deeply and echoes words I have heard repeatedly in recent days from colleagues and other people in my life. Being a true advocate of change, a true ally to the Black community, requires “the willingness to be uncomfortable.” This has been a time of essential discomfort for the U.S.—“a moment of reckoning that has been a long time coming,” as my colleague Justin Worland writes in this issue’s cover story, a searing and personal accounting of American denial about systemic racism. “Politicians, activists and everyday people can and should debate what to do about this reality,” Justin writes, “but it is a reality, one evident in volumes of data, research…

GENERALS FROM INDIA AND CHINA MET high in the Himalayas on June 6 for talks aimed at defusing border tensions between the world’s two most populous nations. Each nuclear-armed side has accused the other of provocations along their 2,000-mile disputed frontier. China believes a new Indian road near the border upends the balance of power; Indian hawks say China has moved troops into their territory. In early May, fistfights broke out between soldiers. Weeks on, officials are still trying to stop the scuffles from escalating into a shooting war. BLURRED LINES Although troops from both sides reportedly pulled back in some places on June 9, the situation remains tense. Accurate information is hard to come by, but analysts say there has been a Chinese buildup of military hardware behind…

When I ran for the Minneapolis city council in 2017, I knew that the police department had a decades-long history of violence and discrimination. I ran on a platform of police reform informed by my experience seeing police harass black canvassers I worked with as a community organizer, and by the police shooting of Jamar Clark in 2015, which prompted weeks of protest. In 2017, the police shooting of Justine Damond further cemented accountability as a central theme of that campaign year. In my first two years on the council, Minneapolis police officers shot and killed more people, including Thurman Blevins, Travis Jordan, Mario Benjamin and Chiasher Fong Vue, and were caught in a body-cam audit asking EMTs to sedate suspects with ketamine. The Police Officers Federation refused to…

I have real respiratory challenges. I can’t count the times I’ve said, “Momma, I can’t breathe.” “Daddy, I can’t breathe.” “Please, help me. I can’t breathe.” Every time, every single time, someone helped. I cannot even imagine what it would be like to get no help. Since George Floyd died, tears have overcome me at least once a day. And then, as I thought about it, I have felt this pain in varying degrees for as far back as I can remember—at least since the first time I was called a n-gger in elementary school. The pain sears me every day, now. It’s an emotional pain. It’s a physical pain. It is the pain of oppression in a country that’s supposed to be free. I have been so blessed. I…

THE NOVEL CORONAVIRUS AND THE KNEE THAT Derek Chauvin casually placed on George Floyd’s neck for close to nine minutes have shown the exact same thing: there is a racial hierarchy in the U.S., and people of color—particularly black people—are at the bottom of it. At this point, several months into the pandemic, most people are aware that COVID-19 has disproportionately killed black people in the U.S. In Louisiana, black people account for more than 53% of those who have died from COVID-19, although they make up only 33% of the population in the state. In Cook County, Illinois, they have made up 35% of the county’s COVID-19 deaths while constituting 23% of the population. In New York City, which was until recently the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak…

PRONE TO DEPRESSION TO BEGIN WITH, and living alone on an 80-acre farm, I have found myself fighting those dark dogs and thinking, on more than one occasion, that while we are trying to mitigate one pandemic, we may inadvertently be causing another. The times I have been out have seemed surreal, everyone’s face covered with masks, some black, some white and some fancy, with floral fabric and even lace trim, but that can’t change the fact that half of the human face has been eradicated by this virus, only the eyes visible. They say that the eyes are the windows to the soul, but COVID has taught me that this is untrue. The eyes tell part of the story, but the soul can be glimpsed only when one…

WE’RE LIVING THROUGH A SERIOUSLY UNFUNNY POCKET OF history. Anger over police brutality and racial injustice has spurred radical action that’s been a long time coming. A global pandemic has frozen us all in place, disproportionately harming or killing the vulnerable. People struggle to feed their families as unemployment soars. And we don’t even have the promise of summer movies—particularly the mindless summer comedy, watched in the dark with a bunch of strangers—to help us forget ourselves for just an hour or two. Can a comedy streamed into your home, and watched alone or perhaps with one or two other people, offer any solace right now? This summer will be the test, with upcoming comedies including a new Will Ferrell film, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga; Irresistible,…

A lot of your work feels like it’s about the relationship of black people to America, and the extent to which violence is a critical part of that relationship. Is that an intentional thing? I don’t think that is intentional, but if you want to tell the story of who we are, just the fact that we were stolen from Mother Africa and brought here through the Middle Passage and no one knows how many people, our ancestors, didn’t even make it. And now we’re 401 years later, 1619, the first slave ship went to Virginia. So our entire existence from day one till today has been one of violence that is brought against us. And the more I think about it, we’ve got trauma. We as a people…

North Korea stops talking to South Korea Pyongyang said June 9 it would cut off all lines of communication with South Korea and start treating the nation as an “enemy.” Relations between the two have deteriorated since nuclear negotiations with President Trump collapsed in February 2019. Election trouble in Georgia Primary elections in Georgia were marred by hours-long waits and problems with new voting machines on June 9, prompting the Georgia secretary of state to open an investigation and summoning echoes of the state’s disputed governor’s race in 2018. Some of the worst issues occurred in majority African-American areas. Iran sentences ‘CIA agent’ to death An Iranian blamed for sending the U.S. information about the whereabouts of General Qasem Soleimani, a powerful figure killed by a U.S. drone strike…

DIED Bonnie Pointer Genre-defying pop star IT DIDN’T MATTER WHETHER BONNIE POINTER WAS SINGING JAZZ, soul or disco; if she was on the Grand Ole Opry stage or on the set of the film Car Wash next to Richard Pryor. Pointer had talent, charisma and ambition that transcended conventional bounds; she was constantly rewriting the limits of her career. Pointer, who died June 8 at 69, grew up in Oakland, Calif., singing gospel in her father’s church alongside her sisters. It was a collaboration that would eventually take them far beyond the congregation. As the Pointer Sisters, they started out by dressing up in 1940s evening gowns to sing jazz licks at breakneck speeds, but their first major hit was the Allen Toussaint–penned “Yes We Can Can,” an exuberant…

In her 2019 book, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, Stanford professor Jennifer Eberhardt examines the role that implicit bias—which she defines as “the beliefs and feelings we have about social groups that can influence our decisionmaking and our actions, even when we’re not aware of it”—plays in police interactions. With law enforcement reform now in the spotlight, she spoke to TIME about what could make a difference. You’ve worked with several police departments on improving interactions between the police and communities of color. What reforms would you like to see? A lot of police departments have these implicit-bias trainings. This is a huge business now, where you have consultants who come in. But those trainings aren’t evaluated, and so we don’t…

Have these protests succeeded in shining a light on the systemic issues facing people of color in America? I’m old enough to remember the civil rights movement in the ’60s, and as momentous as it was leading to the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, never before have I seen protests of this magnitude in all 50 states, involving people of all races, all ages, of all backgrounds. And that is heartening, but protests alone aren’t enough. What are some of the policy solutions that you’d like to see put forward, and at what level? When President Obama was in office, he convened a task force on 21st century policing to say, What are the best practices around the country to improve this relationship, this bond of trust…

AT THE DAWN OF THE PANDEMIC, AS businesses shuttered and frontline workers braved inadequate conditions and the death toll began to tick frighteningly upward, I was home alone, nursing one selfish obsession: that I would use this time to get in really good shape. I am not proud of this—I would much rather write that I was raising money for communities disproportionately affected by this crisis, or delivering meals to the immunocompromised—but it’s the truth. The more I thought about it, the more the idea sharpened in my mind’s eye: this persistent fantasy of how I would emerge anew once the lockdown lifted, athletic and radiant, the best I’d ever been. I envisioned myself on the book tour for my upcoming novel, reading a moving passage to a rapt…

WHEN LONDON-BASED LAWYER AND women’s-rights activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu first heard the news of George Floyd’s killing on May 25, her gut reaction was raw anger. “George Floyd was every black person in that video,” she says. “Every one of us can identify with that knee on our necks, not letting up, with that pressure increasing until it suffocates us.” Floyd’s final words, “I can’t breathe,” have been emblazoned on placards and chanted by crowds from Sydney to Cape Town, Paris to Seoul, who have gathered in global solidarity protests since May 30. “We’re trying to show that despite being bombed and losing people and then being called terrorists, we still feel empathy. We still feel for people like George Floyd who are being oppressed in other parts of the world,”…

WHEN THE PAYCHECK PROTECTION Program (PPP) launched in April, it came with promises of equitable relief for U.S. small businesses ravaged by the coronavirus. By June 4, when the employment report showed 2.5 million U.S. jobs added in May, President Donald Trump framed both the program and the report as good news for minorities. “A great day in terms of equality,” he said as he prepared to sign legislation easing PPP forgiveness requirements. In fact, those same figures showed unemployment had grown for African Americans to its highest point in over a decade. African Americans are disproportionately suffering from both COVID-19 and its economic fallout, and the PPP system looks like an extension of the problem. The Small Business Administration, which runs the program, has not released a list…

ONE OF THE MORE INSIDIOUS HABITS OF THE NEW coronavirus behind COVID-19 is its tendency to settle into unsuspecting hosts who never show signs of being sick but are able to spread the virus to others. A new study out of Scripps Research Translational Institute reviewed data from COVID-19 patients around the world and found that up to 40% to 45% of coronavirus cases can likely be traced to people who spread the virus without ever knowing they were infected. “The range of what can happen with SARS-CoV-2 is from no symptoms to [death],” says Dr. Eric Topol, director and founder of the institute and one of the authors of the paper. “That’s not at all similar to any virus or pathogen we’ve experienced that has killing potential in the…

THE GEORGE FLOYD PROTESTS IN the U.S. hold deep resonance for Black Britons. We have long struggled to keep our story at the forefront of the national agenda. And as conflicting as it is, the attention and outrage that is felt around Black American injustices is useful for us to explain what we are going through here. By default, Black people are a political bloc confronted with social and economic disadvantages that show up irrespective of our individual lifestyles. In the U.K., Black men have double the unemployment rate of white men, Black children are four times as likely to be arrested than white children, and Black women are five times as likely to die from complications of pregnancy than white women. And just as Black Americans have a fraction…

ON MARCH 11, A GROUP OF TRADERS INSIDE THE NEW YORK FEDERAL RESERVE Bank had the chance to watch, in real time, as financial markets spiraled downward. The market was in a panic that day. Stocks were down about 20% from their high in February, and the bottom didn’t seem within view. As the novel coronavirus pandemic was starting to roll across the country, markets were trying to price in the near biblical damage it might cause. The traders inside the Fed had the unenviable job of trying to make sense out of the chaos. They met around a conference table, nursing their coffees, taking notes and speaking to their colleagues throughout the country. The New York team was the central bank’s eyes and ears in the market, and their…