2020 protests moved policy and sparked nationwide monument removals

Evidence

At first the changes wrought by those protests seemed to come shockingly swift. The weeks of demonstrations finally moved lawmakers in some places to ban chokeholds by police officers, to consider stripping law enforcement of the qualified immunity that has made it almost impossible to hold responsible officers who kill, and to discuss shifting significant parts of ballooning police budgets into funding for social services. Soon the outrage over police violence morphed into something broader. Protesters who understood that police officers are simply the enforcement mechanism of a vastly unequal society maintained by historic and systemic racism took a stand against monuments to enslavers and bigots from Virginia to Philadelphia to Minneapolis and New Mexico, defacing or snatching down statues and pushing local and state politicians to locate the moral courage to realize that they indeed did have the power to purge from public spaces icons to white supremacy. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1322

Categorization

• XREF: The monuments-to-enslavers thread connects to the book’s broader ‘we still honor the enslavers’ infrastructure argument — public statuary as origin-story infrastructure.