Nine ideas for making our city’s public space more race equitable

It was a photo that captured the divide. Late last month, Nick Swartsell, news editor at the Cincinnati alt weekly CityBeat, snapped an image of a group of young, white urbanites in the city’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood enjoying a round of beers in an alfresco dining space improvised along the street for the age of COVID-19. Just beyond the group was another sight: a flurry of masked marchers, fists raised, protesting the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The image, first published as part of CityBeat’s protest coverage, went viral after it was disseminated by television writer Ziwe Fumudoh on Twitter, where she wrote: “There are two Americas: one fights for Black lives and the other fights for brunch.”