At nearly every turn in Denver, protesters confront a reason to march

Kenny White, a black man in his late 20s, joins the downtown Denver protesters near dusk. A speaker has just wrapped his exhortation to the hundreds gathered at the west steps. “This is not a black-versus-white issue,” he says. “This is an us-versus-them issue.” The words “By any means necessary” are spray-painted on the Capitol wall behind him. Across the street, in the Civic Center amphitheater, Pastor Rico Wint is collapsing 400 years of black history into a plea for people to educate themselves: “If you know more about the Jordan Rules than the Black Codes, you have a problem.”

It is the eighth night of nationwide protests set off by videotape of a white Minneapolis police officer’s indifferent asphyxiation of a black man named George Floyd. It is the eighth night White has come to the Capitol to march to demand accountability. He will be here on the ninth night and the 10th and the 11th and the 12th. He will be here as long as there are protests, as long as people are listening, as long as he needs to be.

“How long was the bus boycott in Montgomery? A year? It takes time to get real change done,” White says on Day 12. “I’m not here for Day 10 or Day 14. I’m here for Day 365, Day 710. This shit has to stop before I have kids. I never want to have to explain to my kids why the world is a dangerous place because they look like me.”

The protesters — of every race and ethnicity — call out for justice. They denounce institutional racism, the federal, state and local policies that deliberately have favored whites in almost every realm of life. In Colorado, the consequences play out from womb to grave, in ways seen and unseen. But they are obvious in data point after data point after data point.

Read more: https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2020/06/13/colorado-protesters-institutional-racism-disparity-health-income-education/