The American Voices Project gratefully acknowledges support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University; the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; the David and Lucile Packard Foundation; the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, and San Francisco; the Ford Foundation; The James Irvine Foundation; the JPB Foundation; the National Science Foundation; the Pritzker Family Foundation; and the Russell Sage Foundation. The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality is a program of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences.
There are a number of words with the syntactic capacity to accurately represent the feel of the rebellions of 2020: “intense,” “furious,” “eruptive,” “explosive,” and “transformative.” To describe the uprisings as “spontaneous,” though, would be disingenuous. There is a genealogy to the massive protests of 2020 that can be traced back to historical forms of structural and racialized violence that endure today.