2020 Guardians of the Year
80 Time December 21/December 28, 2020
Porche BenneTT-Bey had a simPle message
for then candidate Joe Biden in September when
she approached the microphone at Grace Lutheran
Church in Kenosha, Wis.: he needed to better under-
stand the Black experience in her hometown. “A lot
of people won’t tell the truth,” she said without
flinching. “But I’m telling the truth.”
Kenosha had been in the headlines for days after
Jacob Blake, a Black man, was shot in the back seven
times by police and left partially paralyzed. Protests
engulfed the city, pushing local officials to impose a
curfew. Later, a white teenager gunned down pro-
testers, killing two, and President Donald Trump vis-
ited to court votes behind a slogan of “law and order.”
Bennett-Bey, a local organizer, expressed frus-
tration that the officers who shot Blake remained
free, immune to laws that would surely have con-
demned anyone without a badge, but she also ex-
plained that these events didn’t happen in a vacuum.
She told Biden how gentrification had limited afford-
able housing stock and how police target the city’s
minority population. She described feeling that she
was turned away from work because of the color of
her skin. She spoke urgently of the challenge of rais-
ing children amid the COVID-19 health crisis. “I just
felt I might as well tell him about what was really
going on,” she tells TIME at a late-November rally
she planned. “Let him see my life.”
For decades, the words of those telling the truth
have been left largely unheeded. Because the victor
writes history, the history of the West has been writ-
ten to minimize the realities experienced by people
of color, even to those who experience them first-
hand. Marginalized groups have been lied to, told
they were intellectually inferior, or should be able
to succeed if only they worked harder or pulled up
their pants. That means the simple act of telling the
truth requires courage—and can feel self-defeating.
“Even if I should speak, no one would believe me,”
James Baldwin wrote in 1962. “And they would not
believe me precisely because they would know that
what I said was true.”
But in the summer of 2020, the truth became un-
avoidable. For the better part of 10 minutes, a white
police officer in Minneapolis knelt on George Floyd’s
neck even though he was clearly subdued and plead-
ing with a refrain of “I can’t breathe.” The footage
shook the world to its core. The callousness and in-
deed the racism were impossible to deny.
Suddenly, the voices of those who had long been
sidelined broke through, demanding that the world
pay attention and stop making excuses. But it wasn’t
out of thin air. It was because activists like Bennett-
Bey forced their fellow Americans to connect the dots
and understand just how much—from police brutality
to racial disparities in COVID-19 cases—is tied to sys-
temic racism. Night after night, organizers put their
bodies on the line, gathering people of all races at a
time when close quarters posed a threat, on top of the
risk of injury at the hands of law enforcement. They
chanted Floyd’s name alongside those of other Black
Americans killed in recent months— Ahmaud Arbery,
Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Elijah McClain. By
some estimates, as much as 10% of the U.S. popula-
tion took to the streets over the summer to call for an
end to institutional racism and injustice, in what may
have been the largest mass protest in American history.
“We have some of the whitest, wealthiest towns
here in our district organizing Black Lives Matter
rallies, vigils and marches,” says Jamaal Bowman, a
Black Representative-elect from New York. “Young
white kids are forcing their parents to be a part of
the movement and to be part of the conversation.”
Marches erupted in more than 50 countries, in cit-
ies from Nairobi to Seoul to Rio de Janeiro, expand-
ing beyond solidarity to highlight similar issues in
their own nations. Black French activists exposed the
country’s persistent police brutality and organized
huge marches. Aboriginal Australians showed how
attempts to eradicate their ancestors still shape their
daily lives. The storytelling and the organizing of ac-
tivists around the world drove a recognition that at
least in polite company, yes, Black lives matter. Im-
migrant lives matter. Aboriginal lives matter.
Next year will usher in a new era: post-Trump,
eventually postpandemic and post–racial awakening.
Whether this moment will be channeled into con-
crete societal change or lost to the wind remains to
be determined. “Is it going to happen overnight? No,”
says Bennett-Bey. “But am I willing to put in the work
to see that change? Yes.”Children around the world wind their way
through the school system hearing triumphant narra-
tives about their country that are built on half-truths.
Students in the U.S. learn that despite their nation’s
history of allowing humans to be bought and sold, a
handful of great heroes bent the so-called arc of his-
tory toward justice and excised racism. In England,
the national curriculum stipulates that school-
children should learn “how Britain has influenced
and been influenced by the wider world,” but that
rarely means exploring how Britain gained completeRACIAL-JUSTICE
ORGANIZERS
PORCHE
BENNETT-BEY
Kenosha, Wis.
The Army veteran
and mother of
three quit her job
as an in-home
care assistant this
summer to devote
her time to racial-
justice work. “This
has changed my
life,” she says.They brought millions to
the streets to demand an
end to systemic racism
By Justin Worland