While Donald Trump has tried hard to divorce America form the rest of the world?
That Has NOT happened…
Taking a cue from America…
Protests HAVE grown in Europe against Trump style racism there….
It took the killing of a black man in the United States, choked under the knee of a white police officer, to bring people out into the streets in Europe.
The Continent doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to tackling racism — or even admitting it exists. Despite the prevalence of racial profiling, police brutality and discrimination against non-white citizens in labor and housing markets, Europe hasn’t seen a tide-turning civil rights movement capable of making an impact on the political sphere.
Now, after an angry week that saw unprecedented protests across the Continent, some activists are seeing reason for hope: that Europe is finally ready to start grappling with racial injustice on its soil.
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For Europeans watching events unfold across the Atlantic — as thousands took to the streets across the U.S. — it was the massive, and seemingly effective, response that followed George Floyd’s death as much as the brutality of his killing that spurred them to action. At a time when U.S. President Donald Trump has tarnished the national brand in the eyes of many in Europe, activists took cues and borrowed slogans from a civil rights movement that has inspired people on both sides of the Atlantic for decades.
In Belgium, some 10,000 people gathered in front of Brussels’ Palais de Justice for a protest organized by the Belgian Network for Black Lives. In a sea of hand-drawn “Black Lives Matter” and “No justice, no peace” placards, people held up signs calling out the country’s history of racism — “Belgium, too” and “We need to talk about Leopold II and Belgian colonies” — and the names of recent victims of police violence.
A planned protest last week organized by families of victims of police brutality in France — including Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old black man who died in police custody in 2016 — drew record numbers of people in Paris. In cities across Germany, Spain, the U.K. and the Netherlands, protesters also flouted lockdown rules to flood public squares to demand justice for the people of color who died in police custody in their own countries. They filled streets in Dublin, Copenhagen and Milan. In Bristol, in the U.K., protesters tore down the statue of a 17th-century slave trader, dragged it through the streets and threw it in the harbor.
“It’s a big surprise for many of us — we’ve never seen this kind of thing before,”….
image….A police officer walks past demonstrators’ signs outside the University of Oxford. As protests over racial injustice sweep across the U.S., Europe faces its own history of prejudice and violence against minorities. | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images