Imagine that no one had shot video of George Floyd being killed by police in Minneapolis. There would have been a bland statement that he had died resisting arrest, and none of us would have heard of him.
Instead, the horror of that video has ignited protests around the world. Racism in that video is as visceral as a lynching.
Yet there is no viral video to galvanize us about other racial inequities:
* There is no video to show that a black boy born today in Washington, D.C.; Missouri; Alabama; Louisiana; Mississippi or a number of other states has a shorter life expectancy than a boy born in Bangladesh or India.
* There’s no video to show that black children still are often systematically shunted to second-rate schools and futures, just as they were in the Jim Crow era. About 15% of black or Hispanic students attend so-called apartheid schools that are less than 1% white.