Thousands of people went down on their knees on the streets outside the U.S. embassy in Ireland, the third of its kind following the killing of Floyd, demanding a systematic change to the deep-rooted racism in the United States and other countries.
On Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that all Canadian police should be equipped with body cameras as a simple way to address complaints of racism and brutality.
"With the many disturbing reports of violence against black Canadians and indigenous people, we know that we need to do much more," Trudeau said at a press conference in Ottawa. "We need to do it now."
Trudeau and his ministers took a knee in solidarity with the demonstrators who were marching against racism and police brutality in Ottawa on Friday.
The World Health Organization (WHO) also expressed its full support to the global movement against racism, but highlighted the importance for protesters to take preventive measures against COVID-19.
"WHO fully supports equality and the global movement against racism. We reject discrimination of all kinds. We encourage all those protesting around the world to do so safely," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a virtual press conference.
DOUBlE STANDARDS
Racism has been a chronic problem in the United States, with a history almost as old as the country itself. Floyd's death serves as a new, chilling reminder that racial discrimination seems to be showing no signs of improvement among the American population.
In a report released in April by the Pew Center, 58 percent of Americans surveyed in 2019 said race relations in the United States are bad, and few of those see any improvement in such relations. Some 56 percent think the current administration has made race relations worse.
The ravaging coronavirus pandemic, meanwhile, has served to highlight the long tradition of racial inequality in the United States, after recent data compiled by the non-partisan APM Research Lab revealed that African Americans are suffering a disproportionate share of the negative health and economic impacts of COVID-19.
With a death toll of more than 20,000 or about one in every 2,000 of the entire U.S. African American population, African Americans are dying at a rate of 50.3 per 100,000 people, compared with 20.7 for whites, 22.9 for Latinos and 22.7 for Asian Americans, the data showed.
Moreover, African Americans are facing an ever higher risk of dying at the hands of police due to the color of their skin. According to Mapping Police Violence, a research and advocacy group, black Americans are 2.5 times as likely to be killed by law-enforcement officers as white Americans.
"More than 1,000 Black people die at the hands of police in the U.S. every year," the Nelson Mandela Foundation last week.
"Mass incarceration, predictive policing, targeted surveillance and a host of other tools render Black lives more vulnerable than all others," said the foundation, which was established in 1999 to promote freedom and equality.
Zivadin Jovanovic, former foreign minister of Yugoslavia, told Xinhua the death of Floyd and the U.S. response to ensuing protests demonstrated double standards in the country's policies on certain rights it has been insisting on around the world.
"The rights are acceptable for them only in their objective to dominate globally," he said.
Jovanovic noted that racial discrimination is deeply rooted in the history of the United States' socio-economic and political practice, and segregation is still visible in the distribution of wealth and availability of health protection.
Indonesian political analyst Irwansyah said that the death of Floyd reveals the double standards of Washington, adding that the protests are caused by not only racism, but also other factors such as economic inequality and the failed COVID-19 response.
The sentiment was echoed by Turkish expert Deniz Zeyrek, who pointed out that the anger of demonstrators is not only about the situation of African Americans or the death of Floyd, but also about the whole social problems in the United States.
