Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Last summer up to 26 million Americans marched in the streets in support of Black Lives Matter, specifically police brutality toward African Americans. George Floyd and Breanna Taylor put faces to a violent practice in law enforcement that has taken hundreds of innocent Black lives. America was outraged. They’d had enough. It was one of the proudest moments in American history. Which is why it is so disappointing to me that many of the same people who took to the streets a year ago to protest racism are okay with standing by and letting it take hundreds of Black lives every day. The principle is the same: systemic racism encouraged and allowed police to target Black people with excessive, sometimes fatal violence. And systemic racism is allowing COVID-19 to kill a disproportionate number of Blacks.
