Ford Program Officers on Why Black Lives Matter to Philanthropy
We are living in anxious, often frightening times. Earlier this month, the deaths of Philando Castille and Alton Sterling sparked a new round of public protest against the toxic blend of racism, hypermasculinity, and state violence that has taken the lives of too many black men and women and people of color in the U.S.
At one protest in Dallas, a lone gunman killed five police officers: Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Michael J. Smith, Brent Thompson, and Patrick Zamarripa.
We’ve seen reductive attempts to frame the murders in Dallas as a confrontation between protesters and law enforcement, but that obscures the larger democratic principles at play: The officers died while protecting the right to freedom of expression and peaceful protest, and are inexorably linked to Philando Castille and Alton Sterling...