Social Protests of 2020
The Social Protests of 2020: Visceral Responses to Police Brutality, COVID-19, and Circumscribed Sexuality collects voices from various Black intellectuals – university professors, a scientist, media communication specialist, poets, a visual artist, and political activists – to illustrate how the simultaneity of high-profile political events in the summer of 2020 manifest in our consciousness at one time. Reflecting the contributors’ honest visceral responses, the essays reveal the anguish, sadness, and motivation to act that each of them experienced in light of police brutality, COVID-19, and the Supreme Court's handling of employment discrimination against LGBTQIA+ communities. These voices address, in carefully reflected and theoretically formed ways, those universal feelings that level all human beings, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, economic status, and education.
Joyce A. Joyce is professor in the English Department at Temple University.