2020-07-16

On Monday, July 13, Washington’s NFL team announced that it will change its name, following decades of pressure to stop using a dictionary-defined racial slur. Earlier this month, major sponsor FedEx asked the team to change its name; companies, including Amazon, Target and Walmart, said they wouldn’t sell the team’s merchandise if things didn’t change. On Tuesday, July 14, 87 protesters sat on the lawn in front of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s house in Louisville, demanding justice for Breonna Taylor. They sat in lines with their hands in their laps. They were unarmed, touching no part of the Attorney General’s home other than the grass. This group was made up mostly of young White people and people of color. All 87 were arrested and charged with a felony. By contrast, on May 24, Ben Kennedy hosted the Patriot Day 2nd Amendment Rally at the Kentucky state capitol with about 100 people in attendance. Towards the end of the rally, a number of the attendees, some of them armed, marched to Governor Andy Beshear’s Mansion, demonstrated in the garden, and placed a letter on the patio door. This was followed by a handful of people hanging an effigy of the Governor from a tree. This group consisted of mostly White men, women, and children who were protesting over COVID-19 restrictions. Zero arrests were made in response to this protest. On Tuesday, the city council of Asheville, North Carolina unanimously approved a reparations resolution for its Black residents. The resolution does not mandate cash payments to descendants of enslaved people. Instead, it calls for “forming policy and programs that will establish the creation of generational wealth and address reparations due in the black community,” as well as asking the state legislature and federal government to do the same. Also on Tuesday, The Trump administration withdrew a proposed rule that would have forced foreign students to return home if the courses they were enrolled in were to be held entirely online when colleges reopen in the fall. The proposal was rolled back after dozens of universities joined Harvard and MIT who filed the first of several lawsuits seeking to overturn the directive. On Wednesday, July 15, Walmart, Kohls, and Kroger announced they would require masks nationwide. Today, July 16, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron asked a state judge to block all Governor Beshear’s COVID-19 orders and prohibit him from issuing or enforcing any new orders. Beshear responded: “With no rules, there is no chance of getting kids back to school, we will lose over $10 billion in our economy and many Kentuckians will die. I hope everyone understands how scary and reckless this is.” Today, like many other days of this pandemic, we swing back and forth between feeling powerless and believing we can fix our broken world. Today, again, we continue to get through things together, celebrating small victories while working on the bigger changes to come. #TeamKentucky #TogetherKY