A collection of green shoots of hope

After spending most of the week searching for, and documenting, the myriad ways in which a worldwide wave of outrage and Black Lives Matter protests are already pushing our societies to being more just, I was happy to learn today that I wasn't the only one. 

As reported by The Huffington Post:

In the weeks since police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, nonstop protests across the U.S. have called out systemic racism and police brutality — and have already given rise to significant reckonings and policy changes in cities and companies nationwide.

[...]

Last week, former President Barack Obama compared the recent protests to those in the late 1960s civil rights era, calling this moment a “sea change,” adding that there’d been “as much honest conversation in this country on the topic of race in the past week as has taken place in my living memory.” Civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) echoed the sentiment, praising the racial diversity of today’s protests, which have been largely led by young Black people, saying these would “help redeem the soul of America.”

And so far, the Black Lives Matter protests — which built off years of work by BLM activists since 2013, in the streets, in halls of government and educating the public — have spurred some significant changes.

From cities redirecting funding from police departments, to Confederate monuments coming down in droves, here are some of the steps toward racial justice and ending police brutality that we’ve seen in just 16 days since protests began [...]

The rest of the piece is a list of those steps, currently forty-six items long and, presumably, counting.

Among the items listed:

• 6 examples of the police being held accountable for brutality towards Black people, peaceful protesters, journalists, and others;
• 4 examples of American cities de-funding their police departments, shifting focus to mental health, social workers, addiction treatment, and education;
• 3 examples of school boards cutting ties with their local police departments, and removing armed officers from their schools;
• 4 examples or monuments to racism being toppled, including a statue of a slave trader in Bristol, in the United Kingdom;
• 7 examples of the tech industry finally tackling their own problematic policies regarding racism, misinformation, and glorification of violence on their platforms, including IBM and Microsoft killing their nascent facial recognition technologies, and Amazon announcing a one-year moratorium on their own development of Rekognition;
• 3 examples of America's professional sports leagues doing the same, including reversals of policy on protests of the national anthem by both the NFL and U.S. Soccer, and NASCAR, perhaps the most redneck sport ever, banning the Confederate battle flag at its events;
• 4 examples of America's news media facing a similar reckoning, including three high-profile resignations;
• 7 examples of a similar reckoning in the non-news entertainment industry, including three show cancellations, three firings, and two name changes, including that of Lady Antebellum, now known as Lady A;
• 4 examples of shifts in public opinion, including increases in public approval of anti-racism protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, a drop in approval rate for police, and clear recognition that police are more likely to use force against Black people, up by 23 percentage points across America in a matter of weeks.
  

All good stuff, although, as the piece points out:

For activists out on the streets today and the movement for Black lives and racial justice more broadly, the work is far from over. Much of these moves represent incremental change or simple promises of change, and fall far short of what activists are calling for.

[...]

But the changes are significant, part of a wave of new steps signaling that people are no longer tolerating the status quo on racial injustice, and once again showing that massive protests are an effective tool to galvanize the public’s collective voice to put pressure on those in power to make change.

Change is still change; now, we just need to keep this train moving. Lots of baby steps really can add up to a giant stride forward, after all, if you step quickly enough.