Citation

Applewhite DA. Mol. Biol. Cell 2021; 32(19): 1797-1799.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, American Society for Cell Biology)

DOI

10.1091/mbc.E21-05-0261

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

It has been roughly 1 year since the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, who was killed over an alleged counterfeit 20 dollar bill in Minneapolis, Minnesota (Hill et al. 2020; Kaul, 2020; Levenson, 2021). In many ways, his murder was no different than the murders of thousands of other murders of Black people in this country (Thompson, 2020; Lett et al., 2021; Tate et al., 2021). However, what distinguishes George Floyd's murder from many other high profile cases is that it was unambiguously captured on video (Alexander, 1994), an act of bravery by Darnella Frazier, a 17-year-old Black woman (Izadi, 2021), at a time when the world was mostly housebound by a raging global pandemic. As a result, his murder reverberated through society in a way that has not happened in my lifetime. While there have been other high profile cases of murders carried out by police (Treyvon Martin, Walter Scott, Breonna Taylor, and Philando Castile, among many others), these cases failed to fully sustain the attention of a national and international audience (Chan et al., 2020; Chughtai, 2021). The murder of George Floyd was fundamentally different, and for once, more than just Black people were paying attention. His murder sparked protests across the nation led by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement (Day, 2015; Taylor, 2016; Banks, 2018; Taylor, 2021), and the demands for change were so loud people could not help but hear.

As a Black, gay man who is also a scientist, I was thrown into despair. All of my life I have thought if I just worked hard enough, if I am kind and unthreatening, if I play the game and keep my head down, maybe I can make it in academia. Maybe then I will be seen and accepted, not just by society, but by the scientific community. George Floyd's murder reminded me, and many of my Black colleagues, that our degrees can't protect us, that our privileged middle-class upbringing (if we had one) was not a shield. Our lives were not worth more than a counterfeit 20 dollar bill.

Science, which has always been a product of society, was not impervious to these reverberations...

Language: en