The brutal police killing of George Floyd, a middle-aged, unarmed, Black man, provoked a massive wave of protest across America. How did this killing come to represent a much broader set of injustices in American life? Will the protests lead to anything? To get some answers, David S. Meyer interviews scholars Dana Fisher and Rashawn Ray of the University of Maryland. [ dur: 48mins. ]

* Dana R. Fisher is a Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Program for Society and the Environment at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on questions related to democracy, activism, and environmentalism — most recently studying climate activism and the American Resistance. Her research employs a mixed-methods approach that integrates data collected through open-ended semi-structured interviews and participant observation with various forms of survey data. She is the author of the book, American Resistance. Twitter handle: @fisher_danar .

* Rashawn Ray is Professor of Sociology and Executive Director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research (LASSR) at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also one of the co-editors of Contexts Magazine: Sociology for the Public. Formerly, Ray was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, he is a Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institute. He is co-author of How Families Matter: Simply Complicated Intersections of Race, Gender, and Work. His recent article titled, Bad apples come from rotten trees in policing.

Then, how power can breed immorality and hypocrisy. [ dur: 10mins. ]

* Adam Galinsky is the Chair of Management Department and Professor of Business at the Columbia Business School at Columbia University. He is the co-author of FRIEND AND FOE: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both​.​

This program is produced with contributions from the following team members: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.