ABSTRACT
Racism is rampant throughout our society. The callous and viscous murder on May 25th, 2020 of George Floyd, an unarmed Black American man by a White male American police officer, illustrates the pervasive nature of systemic racism in many of our communities. In the city of Minneapolis, a crowd stood and watched as Floyd slowly died from the pressure of the officer’s knee against his neck. George Floyd had been arrested under the suspicion of using an alleged counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. On the same day, in New York City, a white woman launched a verbal attack on a Black man, Christian Cooper, who was bird watching in Central Park. Cooper had requested she leash her dog as stipulated by park rules. When the woman declined, Cooper began to video her response on his phone. The woman called the police and reported an African American was threatening her life. However, when the police arrived at the scene and viewed the video, they realized the woman’s accusations were unfounded and recognized her actions as another racist incident. In this chapter the authors attempt to consider the impact of events such as George Floyd’s murder and the verbal attack on Christian Cooper upon the practice of ethnographic research.
