Hey, listener, over the holidays, we are rerunning some of our favorite episodes from earlier in the year.

Today, I'm going to share a show we broadcast back in June, as the nationwide protests over the

murder of George Floyd were just beginning. Before we get started, I need you to take a moment and

remember how the beginning of June felt.

We've been cooped up for months.

No one knew how the election was going to turn out.

And then suddenly we were all being inundated by one video after another,

showing violence, often perpetrated by the police against peaceful protesters.

And that is where this episode starts.

There's this question I keep asking myself,

as I watch the footage of unrest spooling out from city after city over the last few days. How will all this end? The images are familiar now, the fires, the police and their face shields, armed with

batons and cans of pepper spray, the protesters, sporting bruises, pouring milk on each other's faces.

Sometimes it feels like we're stuck in a loop, reliving the same scenes over and over.

But each time the loop starts up again, it gets more intense, more chaotic.

Watching the protests was a little surreal in that we've seen so much, or I've seen so much of this footage,

reincarnated in different ways over time.

Kelly Carter Jackson is a professor of history at Walsall University.

Ferguson was not that long ago when we were watching something very similar.

If I go back a little bit to my childhood, I think of the Rodney King riots that took place.

If I go back to my mother's generation, she lived through all of, you know, 68 while she was in college.

And so it just feels like, are we making progress?

I wanted to speak with Kelly because this repetition, for me, brings up this other question.

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