WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Leslie Batson, a white office administrator from Maryland, joined the thousands of marchers protesting the killing of George Floyd in Washington, D.C., last weekend after her children asked why the family had done nothing about racism.

“This is my attempt to help elevate the voices of people of color, people who don’t look like me and who don’t benefit from the status quo,” Batson, 42, said on Saturday, as her 9- and 11-year-old children hid shyly behind her.

In recent days, white Americans have donned “Black Lives Matter” shirts, carried homemade signs, and shouted “Hands up, Don’t shoot” in cities and small towns (here) across the United States. Sometimes they lay down in the streets, just as Floyd, an unarmed black man in handcuffs, lay face down and struggling to breathe as a white police officer knelt on his neck.

Books like “White Fragility” and “The New Jim Crow” are topping U.S. best-seller (here) lists, and social media is flooded (here) with #BlackLivesMatter posts. Fortune 500 companies and sports franchises, predominantly run and owned by white Americans, voiced support (here) for anti-racist activism, and the New York Stock Exchange held (here) its longest moment of silence ever for Floyd.

The United States has a long history of white participation in civil rights protests, but the current outpouring of support is unprecedented, historians and social scientists agree.

That said, many question white Americans’ long-term commitment to do the work to fight racism.

“Historically, when we see higher levels of participation from white folks in movements and moments like this, that participation falls off precipitously after we move away from the protest,” said Charles McKinney, associate history professor and chair of Africana Studies at Rhodes College in Tennessee.

After civil rights activists leading protest marches in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 were beaten bloody by police, twice as many Americans polled expressed sympathy with protesters than with the state of Alabama, Pew Research noted (here).

In a separate opinion poll at the same time, however, 45% believed the U.S. administration of President Lyndon Johnson was moving too fast on the voting rights and integration that protesters advocated.

McKinney is analyzing whether the high white protester turnout will translate into laws that aid the Black Lives Matter movement.

“In order for this to be the last racial inflection point… white America must end its sideline sympathy and assume full ownership of this problem,” said Allyn Brooks LaSure, a former U.S. diplomat, and executive vice-president for communications at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a national coalition of civil and human rights groups.

That would include awkward conversations on family Zoom calls, in work conference rooms, and at Thanksgiving dinners, he recommends.

REAL CHANGE OR TALK?

Big companies around the world which have typically stayed away from this debate have pledged (here) over $1.7 billion to advance racial justice and equity. City councils are voting (here) to cut police funding and limit police tactics, and statues to the slave-holding supporters in the U.S. Civil war are coming down.

Reuters research shows (here) some of the same U.S. companies have elevated few African Americans to top jobs; two centuries after it started, the NYSE’s traders and management remain overwhelmingly white; an anti-lynching bill named after a black teen killed in 1955 failed to pass the U.S. Senate on June 5.

On June 8, senior Democrats, including House speaker Nancy Pelosi, donned kente cloth, a Ghanaian fabric that is a prominent symbol of African arts and culture, knelt in the U.S. Capitol building for nearly nine minutes of silence for Floyd.

Charles Preston, a Chicago-based black activist and organizer, called the gesture “ridiculous.”

“I think it’s a charade, it’s hollow, it’s empty and I don’t understand what is the purpose of kneeling,” he said. Politicians, he said, should push for policy changes that help African-Americans instead.

The very gesture, known as “taking a knee,” echoes the “Black Power” raised-fist salute that U.S. Olympic medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos made on the medal podium at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

Half a century later, it was still controversial when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee to protest police brutality and racial injustice in 2016. Years after leaving (here) the team, he has yet to be picked up by another.

A NEW GENERATION

Melanie Campbell, president of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, said veteran activists have doubts this phase will endure for long. But she said the level of anger and frustration after Floyd’s death is new.

    “This is a generation seeing mass shootings in schools, a divisive president, black people being killed and they are pushing back,” she said.

And the demographics of the country itself are changing.

One in 10 eligible voters in the 2020 electorate, about 22 million Americans, will be part of a new generation that is the most ethnically diverse in U.S. history, Pew reports (here), with just 52% of the generation white.

“This is not an unsurmountable task,” said Kyle Holman, a 21-year-old white student in Washington, D.C., who protested on Saturday. “If we can just start by acknowledging that things can be really bad for people of color, have scales fall from our eyes, we will move this debate forward,” he said.

MANILA (Reuters) – After taking a job in a hospital’s COVID-19 emergency room, Philippine doctor Jan Claire Dorado planned to move out of the family home to protect relatives from the risk of infection.

But Dorado’s parents insisted the 30-year-old keep living at home, so her father constructed a makeshift isolation area in a storage room there.

Now, when she returns from work at one of the country’s main hospitals treating coronavirus patients, her dinner is placed outside the room’s door on a stool.

“The hardest part is being away from them. I miss them a lot,” said Dorado, who greets family members from behind a plastic window on a wall covered in foil.

Her parents are considered high-risk for COVID-19 because of preexisting conditions, and Dorado said she once painfully refused her mother’s request for a hug.

Hundreds of Philippine medical workers have been infected by the coronavirus and more than 30 have died.

Safekeeping loved ones is also a high priority for paediatrician Mica Bastillo, even as she confronts COVID-19 head on.

The 38-year-old took on a new role at a children’s hospital in another part of Manila after it became a COVID-19 referral facility in April.

“My family thought about asking me to resign, but anywhere I go I would still have to face COVID,” she said.

With her father and sister battling medical conditions, the family built a makeshift tent next to their home for Bastillo, which they dubbed a “quarantent”.

Made out of plastic sheets to keep out the rain, it allows Bastillo to be with her family at a safe distance.

“My mother put the curtains and the table cloth to make it look like home… And my brother added the plastic sheet. It was a real family effort,” said Bastillo, who still joins her family for nightly prayers seated beside the front door wearing a mask.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday labeled as “shocking” and “disturbing” reports that China’s ruling Communist Party is using forced sterilization, forced abortion and coercive family planning against minority Muslims.

Pompeo highlighted a report about the situation in China’s Xinjiang region by German researcher Adrian Zenz published by the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation think tank.

Pompeo, a persistent critic of China, including its treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, said in a statement the findings were consistent with decades of Chinese Communist Party practices “that demonstrate an utter disregard for the sanctity of human life and basic human dignity.”

“We call on the Chinese Communist Party to immediately end these horrific practices and ask all nations to join the United States in demanding an end to these dehumanizing abuses.”

In his report, Zenz said his findings represented the strongest evidence yet that Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang met one of the genocide criteria cited in the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, namely “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the [targeted] group.”

Zenz said analysis of Chinese government documents showed natural population growth in Xinjiang had fallen “dramatically.” He said that in its two largest Uighur Muslim prefectures, growth rates fell by 84% between 2015 and 2018 and further in 2019.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington referred to a statement by Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, saying that “some institutions are bent on cooking up disinformation on Xinjiang-related issues. … Their allegations are simply groundless and false.” 

Documents from 2019 revealed plans for a campaign of mass female sterilization targeting 14% and 34% of all married women of childbearing age in two Uighur counties, Zenz wrote. The campaign, he said, likely aimed to sterilize rural minority women with three or more children, as well as some with two children – equivalent to at least 20% of all women of childbearing age.

“Budget figures indicate that this project had sufficient funding for performing hundreds of thousands of tubal ligation sterilization procedures in 2019 and 2020,” he wrote.

Zenz said that by 2019, Xinjiang planned to subject at least 80% of women of childbearing age in its four southern minority prefectures to intrusive birth prevention surgeries – placement of intrauterine devices or sterilizations.

He said that in 2018, 80% of all new IUD placements in China were performed in Xinjiang, while only 1.8% of the population live there.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday suggested the tradition of women staying at home to take care of older family members was key to battling the coronavirus pandemic, sparking criticism his comments were sexist.

This is not the first time the 66-year-old leader has been accused of making tone-deaf comments and lacking empathy towards women.

“People want to change women’s role and that is one of the just causes of feminism, but the tradition in Mexico is that daughters are the ones who care the most for parents. We men are more detached,” Lopez Obrador said.

Whereas seniors in nursing homes in Europe had suffered with the pandemic, Mexico’s elders were helped by the custom of being cared for at home, he said, adding that the “Mexican family is the most important social security institution” in the country.

“Translating the president’s nineteenth century thinking when he says: men are more detached, he means irresponsible; daughters take care of their parents, he’s referring to unpaid work; tradition refers to machismo; feminism wants to change roles, true transformation,” Martha Tagle, a lawmaker with the Citizen’s Movement party, said on Twitter.

The hashtag AmloMachista, or sexist AMLO in reference to the president’s initials, was trending.

“AmloMachista insists on sending women to be ‘caregivers’, but we have news for him, we are citizens and we are feminists who will no longer tolerate his presidential misogyny,” Claudia Castello, who describes herself as a sociologist and feminist, wrote on Twitter.

Lopez Obrador’s prickly reaction earlier this year to criticism of his administration over brutal murders of women in Mexico riled feminists and undermined support for him among female voters, helping to fuel protests.

Lopez Obrador has been chastised for not taking the virus seriously enough and pushing for a reopening of the economy too soon.

Mexico has the seventh highest coronavirus death toll in the world with 25,060 deaths and 202,951 cases.

SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Carlos Bilardo, the man who coached Argentina to victory in the 1986 World Cup, has tested positive for the new coronavirus, a source close to his family told Reuters on Friday.

“They carried out a test and it was positive, although he has not shown symptoms and he is good,” said the source.

His former club Estudiantes tweeted in support of Bilardo, their 82-year old former player and manager, who has been living in a nursing home in Buenos Aires since 2018.

He coached a team led by Diego Maradona to the World Cup in Mexico in 1986 and the final four years later and also won three Copa Libertadores titles as a player with Estudiantes between 1968 and 1970.

Argentina has reported 1,184 deaths from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, according to Health Ministry numbers.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday suggested the tradition of women staying at home to take care of older family members was key to battling the coronavirus pandemic, sparking criticism his comments were sexist.

This is not the first time the 66-year-old leader has been accused of making tone-deaf comments and lacking empathy towards women.

“People want to change women’s role and that is one of the just causes of feminism, but the tradition in Mexico is that daughters are the ones who care the most for parents. We men are more detached,” Lopez Obrador said.

Whereas seniors in nursing homes in Europe had suffered with the pandemic, Mexico’s elders were helped by the custom of being cared for at home, he said, adding that the “Mexican family is the most important social security institution” in the country.

“Translating the president’s nineteenth century thinking when he says: men are more detached, he means irresponsible; daughters take care of their parents, he’s referring to unpaid work; tradition refers to machismo; feminism wants to change roles, true transformation,” Martha Tagle, a lawmaker with the Citizen’s Movement party, said on Twitter.

The hashtag AmloMachista, or sexist AMLO in reference to the president’s initials, was trending.

“AmloMachista insists on sending women to be ‘caregivers’, but we have news for him, we are citizens and we are feminists who will no longer tolerate his presidential misogyny,” Claudia Castello, who describes herself as a sociologist and feminist, wrote on Twitter.

Lopez Obrador’s prickly reaction earlier this year to criticism of his administration over brutal murders of women in Mexico riled feminists and undermined support for him among female voters, helping to fuel protests.

Lopez Obrador has been chastised for not taking the virus seriously enough and pushing for a reopening of the economy too soon.

Mexico has the seventh highest coronavirus death toll in the world with 25,060 deaths and 202,951 cases.

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said on Monday a July 10 general election was not about him or a family dispute with his siblings after his estranged brother joined an opposition party.

Lee Hsien Yang, younger brother of Lee Hsien Loong and son of modern Singapore’s founder, Lee Kuan Yew, said last week he had joined the new Progress Singapore Party.

He said the People’s Action Party, which has governed Singapore since independence in 1965, had “lost its way” without his late father.

“He is within his rights as a citizen. This GE is not about me or any family disputes which may involve my brother and me,” the prime minister said when asked about his brother’s decision.

“It’s about Singapore’s future at a very grave moment in our history when we are facing the most serious crisis we’ve seen since independence,” he said.

“Health, jobs and the future” should be the major focus, he said.