By Crystal Hayling, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fall 2021
In May 2020, a video of a white police officer in Minneapolis kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, until he suffocated went viral. I was shook. Shook is not to be confused with shock, which is surprise. White people were shocked. Black people were shook—that deep, existential awareness of our otherness in America.
I’ve worked in philanthropy through other catastrophic racial injustices, including the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers and the uprising that followed their acquittal, the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, and the countless other Black people murdered by racism. Each time, if the story stayed above the fold long enough to elicit a response, foundation leaders would form committees, commission studies, and maybe move a few grants to universities or white-led think tanks that presented beautiful PowerPoints.
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